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 14th 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.
