River of Play

Folklore, Women, and the Great Plains

I'm still early in this poetry project, a handful of early drafts of poems, and I'm beginning to feel a bit of momentum as well as a sense of the various attractors. So it seems like a good time to step back and look at the concerns of the project. 

Since I'm working from an ecopoetic stance, I have a sort of mental checklist of what I want to look toward as basic materials. History. Science. Culture. And this ecopoetry is place-based, so I'm trying to absorb more information about the place around me. Place meaning land, the non-human lives  on that land, and the people who interact with those others. My last project built out from a narrow focus, and I wanted to go larger. Plus, I wanted to explore a bit of the fantastic, a bit of whimsy, something more fictional and fun. So I turned to folklore.

The folklore has been quite rewarding, but at this point, as I step back to look at what's going on, I see a glaring problem: women. Or, rather, the absence of women. This is fairly basic stuff, women's studies 101, really, but it's always a shock to come across it. Again. One of the small ironies, here, is that I'm relying on Louise Pound's Nebraska Folklore as a source. Of course, there are women in the book and in the stories. Usually, they are unnamed wives or wise women mostly working in the background to move the hero along. The Native American tradition fares a bit better, but I don't feel nearly as comfortable exporting that tradition wholesale. There's a bit of touchy history, and a great delicacy is called for. 

So. I'm thinking about women of the Great Plains. If anyone out there knows of folkloric women heroes, let me know. I don't want to expropriate Dorothy Gale, though. Maybe I'll ship Joan of Arc over...

One of the ways this point got driven home was a game group that meets on Sundays at a coffeehouse in town. The group is all male. Nice guys, but still, a curious experience.  

And Back Again

The trip to U of Northern Iowa was uncomfortable, but only as far as the driving was concerned. Rain mixed with snow. Thunderstorms. Wind hammering the car with 30 mph bursts of entirely unnecessary energy. My time with Jeremy Schraffenberger and his students (and, later, the family) was a treat.

They had been reading ecopoets and ecocritical articles the entire semester and engaging the idea of ecopoetry. They had also read my ecopoetry manifesto. The conversation we had was wide-ranging and exciting, but at some level it felt very odd to me. Who was this Engelhardt we were all talking about? Did he really write these things? Can we extend his argument? And, if so, why were they all looking at me?

Great students. It seems clear that UNI is doing a fine job attracting engaged, dedicated students. And if any of them of bouncing over to this post: hello!

I'll add a picture of the building in which we all huddled into a corner to talk about the outside world (though we had a bright green young pine tree outside one window that we used as an object lesson the entire evening).

Jeremy and I went for a very tasty dinner in the short length of Main Street that houses a cluster of neat shops, good coffee, and a clutch of good restaurants. We talked poetry, poetics, university politics, children, and on and on well into the night. If you're ever in the Cedar Falls area, look the man up.

The next morning, I rolled out of town, battled the elements, and prepped for Saturday's game day at the house. (Which games? Thanks for asking! Furstefeld, The Hobbit, and Municipium.) Later today, there's a poetry reading at the main Lincoln library. Busy weekend. And I'm still feeling good.

 

And Why Not a Bibliography

Indeed.

But l also wanted to respond to Benjamin a bit, just to amplify. It's easy for writers concerned with ecology/non-human nature to insist on a level of Truth that goes beyond responsibly informed engagement. In a poem of mine like "Flights of July," for instance, one might insist that the particular wasp identified, or that there really was a man up on a ladder. And while I did research on wasps, the man on the ladder was entirely fiction--but the proposed interaction between human and non...well, that's that sort of thing we're trying to understand. So maybe a real wasp in an imaginary carport? And, as Ben notes, there are things we don't know, like the daily lives of previous generations. So we guess. We use our imaginations to consider and engage. And now the bib (note that MLA now has you noting the format the piece comes in):

Works Cited

Ammons, A.R. Collected Poems 1951-1971. New York: W.W. Norton, 1972. Print.

Adamson, Joni, ed.  American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson, AZ: U of Arizona P, 2001. Print.

Alcosser, Sandra. Except by Nature. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1998. Print.

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. Black Mesa Poems. New York: New Directions, 1989. Print.

Bryson, J. Scott, ed. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2002. Print.

Dove, Rita. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie-Mellon UP, 1986.

Evernden, Neil. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Print.

Gilcrest, David W. Greening the Lyre: Environmental Poetics and Ethics. Reno, NV:  U of Nevada P, 2002. Print.

Hillman, Brenda. Cascadia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001. Print.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan UP, 2004. Print.    

Love, Glen A. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment.  Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 2003. Print.

Merwin, W. S. Travels. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Print.

Ortiz, Simon. Woven Stone. Tucson, AZ: U of Arizona P, 1992. Print.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America.  Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Powell, William Reichert. Critical Regionalisms: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2007. Print.

Quetchenbach, Bernard. “Primary Concerns:  Development of Current Environmental Identity Poetry.” Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Bryson, J. Scott, ed.  Salt Lake City:  U of Utah P, 2002. 249-59. Print.

Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Kaufman, Janet E. and Anne F. Herzog, eds. Pittsburg: U of Pittsburg P, 2005. Print.

Snyder, Gary. Danger on Peaks. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. Print.

Stafford, William. The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999. Print.

Scigaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1999. Print.

Sze, Arthur. Quipu. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005. Print.

---. The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1998. Print.

Thiele, Leslie Paul. Environmentalism for a New Milennium: The Challenge of Coevolution. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. 1946. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York:  New Directions, 1992. Print. 

The Last of the Intro

I have a strange pair that worked together in my head as I composed the poems for “Boomtown.” Yusef Komunyakaa underscored for me the need to continue to engage with the very human context of culture. His poetry is steeped in an awareness of and speaks back to the literary and mythological canon of many cultures. It is instructive to note that his new and collected poems is titled Pleasure Dome. But his erudition does not overwhelm the work.  His control of small narratives was also an inspiration, especially in the poems of Dien Cai Dau. Because of poems like “Jasmine” and “Tuesday Night at the Savoy Ballroom” I wanted more music in my manuscript—songs from each of the eras I worked with—but there was only so much time. The other poet whose erudition I paid careful attention to is Brenda Hillman. Her book Cascadia suggests that there are many different ways to grapple with place. Unlike any of the previous poets, she works in a more, for want of a better word, experimental vein. Her intellectual engagements are far more aggressive than Komuyakaa’s, and I am not sure I enjoy her work as much. For example, her poem “Styrofoam Cup” uses space and a total of fourteen words to suggest dismay over that nigh indestructible artifact of the twentieth century (21). The experiment is interesting, but it does not draw me in. However, her work did continue to remind me that there are many ways to engage and explore place, and a strict adherence to plain speech is not always required.  

One last poet kept coming to mind as I worked. Jimmie Santiago Baca pays careful attention to  family and place. In particular, he describes intergenerational relationships so that we, as readers, participate in a broader sense of what it means to be human, to live the social lives of humans. Examples of this kind of focus include “What’s Real and What’s Not” and “Family Ties.” In the former, two old friends take a camping trip into the desert. The poem is about the relationship of the two men, but it ends with “[w]e enter city limits, / and the torch my body is / dims to old darkness again” (56); too much humanity degrades the spirit. And in the latter poem, Baca feels “no love or family tie,” even when surrounded by them (62). Still, when he heads out into the landscape, he takes his wife and children. In a poem about the issues of land ownership, he finds his own family calming. Throughout Baca’s work, human and non-human are fairly intimate: animals, plants, and landscapes inform his poetry. But the nature that emerges in the poems does not seem to appear as if by special arrangement. Baca engages with nature in a way that lets the non-human act as itself: each actor has their own mind and agenda. They follow their own whims, which the poet quickly notes.

In the end, I could not resist the power of the timeline in crafting “Boomtown.” I struggled to find another organizing principle, but I am content with the shape the project has taken. The book as it stands allows for a variety of voices, of poetic styles, and, yes, of research into its pages. “Boomtown” connects a broad sweep of history—both human and non-human—to the many lives and stories of Lincoln, Nebraska. The book celebrates the sometimes troubling but always interesting diversity of a small city born of imagination and desire, a city that has managed to thrive despite having no real reason to do so. At each step of the composition process, from research to draft to revision, I worked to cultivate the ecopoetic principles I outlined earlier, and at each step the engagement with a larger world, with broader contexts, led to interesting choices and stronger poems. This project has convinced me that ecopoetry is a powerful aid to the imagination and has the potential to offer substantial, important work to local, regional, and global culture. 

Another Bit of Diss

As I have laid them out, three strands unify “Boomtown:” place and history, cooking, and ghosts. All three, I believe, lend themselves to ecopoetic exploration. However, the last section (“I Let Down My Anchor in the Land Around Me”) is the part of the book that engages most clearly with the strand of ecopoetics that insists on the phenomenological engagement and reportage that Scigaj, Gilcrest, and Bryson (among others) look for in ecopoetry. This engagement and reportage is a full-body experience of the world that engages the non-verbal parts of the brain, an experience which is then available for writing. But even at the moment of phenomenological engagement I am concerned, like Neil Evernden in his book The Social Creation of Nature, with the ways that human life frames and informs non-human nature (e.g., “At 27^th and Capitol Parkway” and “Storm Runoff”). It is a poor literary movement that cannot range across the variety of human experience, assuming as I think we must that poems are meant for a human audience. “Flights of July,” for example, explores the kind of interaction with non-human nature that most Americans are likely to have in a suburban (or perhaps even urban) ecotone: in the midst of some human-defined task, a homeowner encounters a wasp. The non-human around us has found a way to coexist, however uneasily that coexistence might be balanced. Poems throughout the book—from “On Ancient History” with its deep historical sweep, through “Wife Speaks” with her concerns about her environment, on to “Seeds of Victory Ensure the Fruits of Peace” which ties the local garden to global events, to “Boulevard Trees” and “Local Flocks” with their details grounded in nature, and on into the last section—all these poems are unified in their exploration of non-human nature. Thus, the ecopoetics of “Boomtown” relies on a variety of contexts and strategies to build a book that in its individual poems might not be immediately recognizable as ecopoems. 

Leslie Paul Thiele has two terms that I have found useful in considering this balance as I drafted the book: interdependence (the notion that humans are webbed into relationships with their history and future, with other life on the planet, and with other humans), and coevolution (thinking and acting interdependently; that is, we're moving forward along with these other relationships) (xxiii). What “Boomtown” seeks to do with ecopoetry is to make explicit the coevolutionary condition. It can be far too easy to forget or ignore the historical and non-human aspects of the places in which we live. The demands and clamoring of our own desires, our schedules, the quotidian, all of these easily command more attention than lives at the margins of our awareness or than the events of fifty or a hundred years ago. But those other lives, the non-human constraints of geography, the choices of our forebears, all of these shape our choices and behavior. Ecopoetry returns our attention to those issues. Reading ecopoems can help us to consider where we are—however far away we might be from the setting of those particular poems—in ways similar to how metaphor works: the tenor is not the vehicle, but we understand each better when they’re brought together. “Boomtown,” then, should have larger resonances beyond Lincoln, and I read Thiele as arguing for “web” in a large, planetary sense.  

In working on this piece, it was hard to ignore the influence of Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (the first section in particular). This manuscript bears witness to the strategies all three employ, but “Boomtown” differs significantly from all three. Both Paterson and the salient section of U.S. 1 have much longer poems (and a much higher degree of interpolation from other sources), though each book breaks up easily into smaller divisions. I also kept returning to Gary Snyder’s Danger on Peaks, which offered the structural idea of small poems revealing aspects of a life, though in my own book the life has become the history of a small city.

Somewhat less obvious will be the influence of Arthur Sze. The poems in The Red-Shifting Web and Quipu offer a model for how poetry can engage multiple topics, agendas, and registers both emotional and intellectual simultaneously. Short poems such as “Syzygy” and “Oracle-Bone Script” move quickly through these registers, but it’s in the longer pieces that Sze’s strategies become truly important. His title poem, “Quipu,” uses couplets, cinquains, isolated single lines, and tercets its nine sections to model the knotted record-strings of the Mayans after which the poem is named. The first section seems to speak to the strategies of his book with these lines: “And as a doe slips across the road behind us, / we zigzag when we encounter a point of resistance, // zigzag as if we describe the edge of an immense leaf, / as if we plumb a jagged coastline where tides // wash and renew the mind” (27). The poem moves fractally (movement patterns become leaf patterns become coastline) as it explores the issue of conception and miscarriage. Throughout, the work remains poetically interesting, intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, especially to me as I was writing.               

And there are other voices that murmur in the background. W.S. Merwin offered ways for nonhuman nature to creep into and overlap with human life. I also struggled toward his more relaxed, unpunctuated line as well as the relationship of that line to the rest of the poem. A poem like “So Far,” with its neatly formed cinquains is a good example. In that poem, the narrative of the newly hatched gecko stumbles across lines much like the lizard itself stumbles across a floor. The story is interrupted by brief diversions into setting and science (“a species rare if not officially / endangered named for one man Rumphius”) (85-86). While less driven by elliptical associations than Sze’s poetry, his poems still range widely over a loose line. I was drawn to William Stafford’s sense of the line, too, though with punctuation. I default to a very short line of few beats, so Stafford offered a useful model. His “Traveling Through the Dark” is the most famous instance, but a poem like “Vocation” that starts “[t]his dream the world is having about itself / includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail” (102) has five strong beats across a mostly iambic line. The rhythm swings steadily, subtly, an effect I was trying to emulate in “At Play with Such Fervor, Such Strange Feelings” and “At 27^th and Capitol Parkway,” among others. The influence of both Merwin and Stafford reverberate throughout “Boomtown.”

Like Stafford, Sandra Alcosser writes her body on to the page, a practice which moves her close to the phenomenological ideal that Scigaj and other critics admire. While I have not consulted her other work much (though there is much to admire in Except by Nature), the idea of the body remained important to me. Characters in “Boomtown” are, mostly, embodied, with the obvious exception of the ghosts. Lastly, while the first section of her book is set in Louisiana, the second section offers details from her life growing up in South Bend, Indiana, and the last section is filled with explorations of non-human nature (in poems like “Spittle Bug” and “Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel”). Her interest in the natural world makes her an obvious model. Although not writing about the Midwest, A.R. Ammons allows nature a kind of place in his poetry that is hard not to admire. In particular, I am delighted by how nature appears in quite familiar settings. For example, from “The Imagined Land” we read that “I want a squirrel-foil for my martin pole” (260). He brings in the language of science, too, as well as the quick, easy rhythms of informal, spoken English. 

Another Bit on Ecopoetics

In response to these difficulties, I followed other trails, all similarly conventional. The University of Nebraska library had good holdings. I interviewed Ed Zimmer, the city architectural historian. But I ran into another blank wall when contacting Jon Roth, a local author whose book Lincoln Looks Back had just been published. While I had several email exchanges, Facebook message exchanges, and several voice mail exchanges, he proved impossible to meet.

Inevitably, the project changed. While I stayed with the idea of my walk to and from the office, I developed characters from the early history of Lincoln to pull together otherwise disparate threads. My greatest disappointment with the closing off of my more open-ended research strategies was the clear limitation of possible surprises, rediscovery, and recovery. The history that was available in published resources was still interesting, but the silences were overpowering. In the end, my choice of topic and material were shaped by my experience as a researcher.

Science, however, was very available. I relied on several publications to sort out native and non-native plant and animal species, which led to some interesting poems. In “Judges 9:45,” which is set sometime in the early 1970s, I explore the native plants that lived in the salt marshes west of Lincoln before the marshes were drained. I return to the saline area in “O Salt Creek Tiger Beetle,” a poem that brings together biological details of the beetle, cultural resonances of salt, history (the role of salt in the Lewis and Clark expedition), and other practices involving salt. The sciences let me explore the idea of geologic history and to keep that long perspective in mind while I worked. While there are political and economic ways to understand the Great Plains and Midwest, the disciplines of geology, biology, botany, and others offer perspectives that, while mediated through culture and science, allow for more a more detached understanding of the place and its landscape.  

The sciences are also at the heart of ecopoetics. Glen Love, in Practical Ecocriticims, encourages people “to keep finding out what it means to be human” (6) and suggests the bioregionalism and ecotones might be some of the useful ideas to explore (31-34). Douglas Reichert Powell argues in Critical Regionalisms that regions can help to explore “how spaces and places are connected to spatially and conceptually broader patterns of meaning […] critical regionalism can be a way to assert what the relationships among places should be” (4). Science is a product of culture even as it struggles to articulate raw facts. I have connected the events and people of the book, of the city, to events and people much farther away as well as to the biology and geology of the place.

As I went along, I realized that certain topics were going to be imposed on me. I had anticipated the Dust Bowl, but I hadn’t considered Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. While I knew that the world wars were going to resonate, I hadn’t known about their impact on the campus particularly. Of course, student enrollment dipped during both wars, but the fact that barracks were built on campus during the second war was new to me. The campus unrest that unsettled many colleges and universities during the 1960s and early 1970s touched UNL in less violent and cataclysmic ways than at other national campuses, yet that revolution had a lasting effect on the campus environment, especially for women, as the old model of the university in loco parentis was dismantled.

From the beginning, it was important to me that the place itself—the land and weather as well as the nonhuman inhabitants—be a character in the collection. The land is changeable, evolving along with the humans, sometimes because of the humans. The place speaks as trees, as a salt basin, as part of the dust bowl, as the various animals that appear in the book. Thus, a theme of environmental degradation runs throughout the book, starting and ending with the salt basin, first as a shallow promise and source of minerals in “Saline” and “Maps of Imagination” and ending with the Salt Creek tiger beetle’s imminent extinction in “O Salt Creek Tiger Beetle.”

The insistent timeline seemed insufficient to me, however, as a unifying principle for the project. Place is a useful category, strong enough to engender this book and countless others, but I wanted to find other categories through which to explore this place. Non-human aspects were useful—plant and animal life, geography, etc—but I wanted a way to think about human lives that was not entirely linked to consumerism (though those links are hard to avoid in a capitalist culture). While visiting my former colleague Christine Stewart-Nuñez, I talked with her about an assignment she had given her students: write in response to recipes. I had liked Simon Ortiz’s “How to Make a Good Chili Stew” and seen other poems that used recipes as either a starting point or as a frame (174). So I began to look for recipes. I tracked down some recipe books in thrift stores and found books on pioneer cooking and on edible plants in the region. I transcribed recipes that seemed particularly interesting or that might have a larger resonance across the project, though I had to abandon some recipes as the project developed.

The recipe strategy allowed the book to describe some of the various ethnic groups in Lincoln (though only a very few and already I can think of other groups I’d like to add) and to explore an important, basic aspect of life—eating. The reduction of humans to their most basic needs allows us to think about ourselves as animals, though animals that pass on a sophisticated culture. Thus, the blood in several recipes operates as a fairly explicit metaphor for family and intergenerational relationships. On a more structural level, the recipes also let me signal changes in era and the accompanying technologies. Thus, the recipes worked in a variety of ways, but I  could not initially find a way to make them work as social commentary.

I also wanted another layer of commentary that did not require my direct observation and that would allow me to explore concerns outside my own. I decided that ghosts might work as commentators. The idea of ghosts certainly isn’t a part of ecocriticism, but I agree with Dana Phillips and David Gilcrest that fictional elements can allow a better understanding of nature—and, by extension, I will argue, place. I chose as my ghosts three early, important, figures: Mary Monell (who came to Lincoln in 1869, started the Universalist Church here, and hosted the first garden party in the city), John Prey (one of the first European settlers in the area), and Standing Bear (a Ponca chief from the region who successfully argued for Native Americans to receive legal status as people; though he’s not from Lincoln, one part of the Ponca tribe is headquartered on E Street near my home). I have borrowed some basic aspects of their personalities (i.e., John Prey’s impulses toward trade and exploration, Mary Monell’s progressivism, and Standing Bear’s concerns for people and land) to allow their ghosts to comment on the developing history of Lincoln. 

Brushing Away Cobwebs

The dissertation is done, defended, and filed. The introduction will be lost, so I thought it might be fun to post it up in chunks here. There's been an expanding interest in ecopoetics, and though this intro isn't particularly transcendent, I hope it might be useful for someone. So, here goes. Chunk number one:

Ecology of a Boomtown

The project that is now “Boomtown: A Prairie Capital” began in the fall of 2005. As I read and explored various critical voices in Thomas Lynch’s ecocriticism class—many of those readings would become formal entrants into my comprehensive examination reading lists—I became convinced that my dissertation project should engage ecocritically with my local environment. That decision was easy to make, but initial conditions are a strangely sensitive group of phenomena and it took some time for the project to develop.

On my long walks to and from campus, I considered the class readings (including critics like Lawrence Buell, Glen Love, Dana Phillips, and collections like The Ecocriticism Reader, among others), ideas about how the “local” in “local environment” is constructed, and the poetry I might explore. I still didn’t have a good sense of what shape the project should take, so the summer after Lynch’s class, I organized a dérive—a walk that adds chance operations to a stroll through the city. I generated a lot of material during that afternoon, and as that walk came to an end, I noticed—not for the first time, but with more focus—a bronze historical marker on the side of Sandy’s bar at the corner of 14^th and O Streets. The marker notes the site of Luke Lavender’s cabin, perhaps the first wooden building built in the area.

As I took a seat at Yia-Yia’s, a local pizzeria, to wait for the rest of the dérive participants, I realized that I had my topic: the daily, two mile walk to and from my office. The areas I moved through included early neighborhoods, the grounds of the capitol, and the university campus itself. I became convinced as I began the project that I—the Romantic subject—was less and less interesting. This conviction was not a question of self-esteem; rather, it came from my developing ideas about ecopoetics. The pastoral, the ramble, the clichéd “solitary in the woods epiphany” poem—all seemed to have the Romantic “I” attached, and the I who was engaging with this project wanted to find a different position from which to explore place. Also, my conviction that I lived in nature, even in this small Midwestern city of 250,000, lead me consider a different subjectivity, a subjectivity that—at least in the poems—opened up to include other voices, other circumstances, a subjectivity that draws attention away from the poet.

Throughout the project I have wrestled with the idea of what it means to write ecopoetry, environmental poetry, or however any number of critics care to describe a poetry influenced by place and nonhuman nature. In order to ground the rest of the discussion of “Boomtown,” I am going to review briefly the positions and critics most central to the project and compelling to me as a poet.

Joni Adamson is one of the first and most persistent voices informing the writing of this project. In American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism:  The Middle Place, she insists that ecologically informed writing needs to expand beyond the nature ramble and return to the local. This insistence is certainly at the heart of what I’m after in moving beyond the Romantic “I” and understanding place. However, “Boomtown” does little to address environmental justice, though the book takes up questions of race in poems like “Recipes You Need,” “The Parks Are Closed,” and “Images of Native America.”

But not every critic demands activist speech. Leonard Scigaj, one of the very first people to use the term “ecopoetry” defines it as a poetry that has an awareness of the limits of language, a poetry that is engaged with processes of perception, considers how perception “welds” subjectivity to the world, maintains the natural world as equal and separate, provides models of behavior, challenges anthropocentric views and encourages biocentrism (xiv). Further, he argues that ecopoetry can help other people re-imagine their relationship to the world (xiv). It was this re-imagining that I had in mind as I moved away from the Romantic “I.”

David Gilcrest, while using the term “pragmatic environmental poetics” instead of “ecopoetry,” calls for poetry to be “pragmatic in its engagement with the world” (113). It “makes room for nonhuman alterity as it compensates for the vicissitudes of symbolic action. It is successful to the extent that it is responsive to both. The best environmental poetry thus reorients our relationship to nature and to language” (113). Later, he notes that such a poetics “acknowledges, either implicitly or explicitly, the limitations that human perception and language place on mimetic ambitions” (123). By writing the history of a city, however, I am foregrounding the history of humans in that place. Yet “Boomtown” turns from solely human concerns and argues implicitly (as early as “Ancient History” and “Uncarved Creek”) that those concerns can be understood—indeed, should be understood—as being intimate with the non-human. Even in a city.

Gilcrest turns to Leonard Scigaj and the latter’s idea of référance. I have not written, for the most part, about an “unmediated experience of the living world” (Gilcrest 136), nor do I completely understand what it might look like on the page, given the levels of cognition and shaping that go into the work of a poem. Nevertheless, my daily trek through the city allowed me to engage with the environment in ways that were very different from my research, which was necessarily text- and photograph-based.

Scott Bryson, in the introduction to his anthology on ecopoetry, defines ecopoetics as  going beyond Romanticism, engaging an interdependent world, expressing a humility before nature, and is skeptical of hyperrationality (5-7). Later in that collection, Bernard Quetchenbach argues that there are different kinds of ecological awareness, including place, region, and bioregion (249-53), categories that were important to the development of this book and that are expressed in the final selection of poems. As an example, the animals and plants in the early poems “Uncarved Creek” and “Legend of the Founding” (native species) are in direct contrast to the animals and plants in the late poem “Exotica” (species introduced by European immigrants).

I had a lot of voices telling me what I needed to keep in mind, but at this point, my project was still rather formless, so I turned to books by John Lane, Rita Dove, William Carlos Williams and William Least Heat Moon—books that looked at place and history carefully—to help me to consider a structure. I wanted to find some unifying moment or character that would let me build the book in a less linear direction than a simple timeline and that would let me reach beyond the limits of my route.

Research, however, proved difficult. The first barrier I faced was the Nebraska State Historical Society. While their online resources were useful, their facility—with its extensive collections—was closed for renovations during most of my project. They reopened almost exactly one month before the project was due.

At the beginning, though, I still had hope that I could use their resources. The website said that the Historical Society collections remained available, but the use of them needed to be arranged by email. So I contacted the Society. It became clear almost immediately that the style of research employed by poets (and perhaps other creative writers) is different from historians or genealogists. I ran into this loop quite a bit:

“I’m looking for information about the history of Lincoln.”

“Excellent. We have extensive material.”

“Good! Could you suggest something?”

“Certainly. What are you interested in?”

“The history of Lincoln.”

“Can you narrow that down?”

“Not yet. I’ll be able to narrow it down when I have more information.”

“Excellent. We have extensive material.”

I can’t quite decide if I had a chicken-or-egg problem or a who’s-on-first problem. The project—and I think this is true for writers generally—required me to sift through a lot of material in order to find stories, people, situations, etc., that suggested drama or offered revealing detail or brought seemingly unconnected strands together. I had a broad vision that I was interested in, and so I couldn’t offer the Society much of a topic. In a sense, I needed to put myself in the path of inspiration. I should note here that “inspiration” in this case turns on a very different conception of the word than the Romantic conception of the word. I mean here the sort of insight that comes from paying close attention to the information that comes from research (and there are many different kinds of research). I resist the Romantic notion of a genius turned inward toward a disembodied muse driven by the writer’s own passions.  

And Now, a Different Flock

A flock of words, that is. For the next, oh, ten days or so Oxford University Press is continuing its celebration of adding back issues of the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), the publication of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE, of which I am a member, though in an effort to conserve paper, we don't carry cards). Not only has Oxford UP taken over the distribution of ISLE, they've digitized the backlist, and the entire thing is available for download--for FREE. The journal publishes academic bits, yes, but also literary nonfiction and poetry. Well worth clicking through. I will admit to shamelessly downloading many, many articles. 

So go. I'll be here. Maybe we'll have a brief chat about the quiverfull movement when you get back. 

Time and the End of It All

I mean to update this space more often, but the living of life has gotten a bit more tricky.

First off, my parents were here this past week, which complicated everything. We expect a better routine and flow, now. Ah, and I turned in a draft of my comps. The field comps are, um, embarrassing. By which I mean way, way too long. Close to the epic scale of D's comps, but only for the field. The focus comps were mostly to scale. 

We took the youngest miss to the emergency room yesterday. Red bits had appeared in her diaper, so when we called the pediatrician's office they rushed us off to the hospital. Not to worry. A bit of constipation had her straining... Oy. I knew we'd spend a lot of time talking about that end of the girl, but it's really kind of hilarious. Color. Volume. Consistency. Of course, I'm somewhat used to this because I scoop the cats' litter (would the whole tray clump if, oh, an adult human pissed in there?), so close attention to excreta is part of my life. 

Let's see... what else? Right. With the comps now infecting my committee members, I can turn toward my diss project. So I get to read, do research, and generally not have to worry about footnotes as I write. A very nice feeling. 

The tasting of lots of stout, galacatogic beers helps with the nice feeling, too.