River of Play

Unsustainable Arctic, Unsustainable You

A friend spent a late afternoon and evening with us a week ago, and I’d add that she’s a new friend, but pretty much all our friends up here are new friends, so the phrasing seemed redundant. We were talking about the ship poised off the west coast of Alaska that’s set to deliver diesel to Nome—a maneuver that will require the ship to run about a mile or so of pipeline over landfast ice to the town. We both started to giggle: what could possibly go wrong?

After we refreshed our tea, we started talking about sustainability in the far north. It’s clearly an issue because we can’t grow enough plant-based foods or supply enough fuel for almost any of us to live up here. Yet, here we are. And many of us are deeply concerned about the environment. So, really, what the hell are we doing up here? 

Not an easy question to answer, particularly if you look beyond the charisma of the landscape, which has both grandeur and subtlety—a particularly attractive combination, but not a sufficient answer to the question.

We decided to flip the question, though. 

When we lived in the lower 48, and a lot of us have come from somewhere else (really, it’s almost as bad as living in Atlanta), how many of us had truly sustainable lifestyles? What happened to us when we came up was that our attention became very focused on the illusions, and illusions get stripped away pretty quickly up here. This place is not a temperate zone, and when it’s forty-five below zero, you can’t just suck up your gut and brave the cold. No one can. You will die. Quickly. Brown bears and wolves live within walking distance, and you are a tasty and easy snack unless you’re prepared. Those are easy examples, but you can walk into a grocery store and tell immediately if the latest truck broke down on the way up. Or, for example, I couldn’t buy grapes today. Simply none were on the shelves. But how many times did I buy grapes in January wherever else I’ve lived and not given another thought to the supply chain?

That issue of the supply chain, and the very odd gaps that appear in stores, becomes the foundation of every choice you make up here. But of course it’s the foundation of every choice you make everywhere. Almost everywhere else, though, the chain is invisible, and that’s what frustrates those of us devoted to environmental issues. 

 

Designing Global Warming

Dana and I went to get new cell phones recently (thereby completing our move of resources up to Alaska—our phone numbers had languished as Nebraska numbers), and I had had a conversation fairly recently about issues surrounding anthropogenic global warming. Together, these topics had me thinking about teleology. 

Not teleology in the formal sense, but a more general feeling of “onward and upward.”

Since our families are not anywhere near the Arctic Circle, and our jobs require us to travel, we went with smart phones that are part of an international provider’s network instead of a local carrier. It’s easy to be seduced by the seemingly unstoppable implications of Moore’s Law—OMG a better camera! better reception! more…stuff! And we fell for the seduction.

As we were figuring out how to set up voicemail, it struck me that these phones are not the future. I mean, of course they are the future, but they aren’t what’s going to make life better, reset our economic imbalances, or solve the pressing issues of food and energy. The phones—and the technology they represent—are important pieces of the solution, but they are also, and perhaps equally, part of the problem. 

We speed along though, don’t we, without thinking about the issues. We might well need more energy…but why? We must upgrade the apps, design, and capabilities of our phones, microwaves, cat box systems, and so on. The idea of not moving forward seems against nature, against evolution. 
As if evolution was teleological. 

Teleology is our own, human, creation. Like money. Like justice, or fairness, or art. Any solution to global warming will rely in part on technology. It seems clear that we will not be content to give up our smart phones, Wii consoles, and movies on demand. It also seems clear that we will not be able power those devices by long-dead biological matter. What we need beyond focus and attention (which is to say, engineering) is an evaluation of our own interests, a better sense of our needs. 
When we come to the issue of needs we come to a dead end. Who ever wants to reconsider—or closely consider—our needs? And do you want to share your resources with people you’ve never met, on the other side of the planet, who might not understand you and your culture? But our technology won’t solve that problem. The technology has no design beyond its own, and the bigger engineering challenge is the larger design. But that design, that progress, always and only relies on us. 

To steal a phrase, we must be the teleology we want to see in the world. The re-engineering of our approach to our wants, though, looks to be much harder than building a multi-touch screen for your coffee table. And in a consumer society you simply don’t get the message to want less. I’ve learned some fun things to do with my phone, so I hope you’re better than me.

 

Writer as a Listening Body

I was talking with a friend of mine a few weeks ago about writing about place. We’re both new(-ish) to Alaska, and we both try to engage the place we’re living—the idea of the place, the reality of the place, the deep history, the non-human… So many aspects. But Alaska is making us mute. Not literally mute, or even figuratively. And yet, we’re having a hard time with the words.

When I lived in Nebraska, writing about the place came a little easier. Though I wasn’t born there, the interest I had in the place felt like I was pouring water into a channel that was subtle—more so because it was ignored. The energy of the water moved smoothly; the water itself was welcome. In flyover country, you’re just happy to be noticed. Beats the hell out of being ignored and taken for granted.   

But Alaska… Alaska’s a tourist destination. It’s a state that conjures images of gold, oil, wilderness—Romance. People from all over the world want to travel to Alaska. And the stakes are much higher when a writer engages that energy.

The reverse of that energy is the protective feeling that the people who live there year-round harbor. If you’ve ever lived in a tourist area, you know what I’m writing about. And you’re immediately suspicious of anyone who drops in for a week or so, takes notes, and then zips away to write their “insights” into the place. I grew up in the Southern Appalachian region, and history of people coming down to tell us our errors and how to save ourselves is long. And hated.

 So what’s a writer and scholar interested in place supposed to do? In a word: Listen. To people. To history. To land. To the non-humans living in the place with you. Listen for complication, for confusion, for the awkward spaces where issues and populations overlap. I’m frequently not very good at it. But I’m trying. And this is a great place in which to be listening.

 

 

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.

 

On the Road Again

I head out day after tomorrow to talk ecopoetics with my friend Jeremy Schraffenberger and his grad students ( doesn't Engelhardt & Schraffenberger sound like a German confectioner?). The weather will be classicly spring-like: chance of rain, mid-50s. As long as the rain is sporadic, it's not bad for driving. Lots of chances for roadside animal spotting. I expect to see at least one eagle.

My new poetry project is aggressively ecopoetic, so the visit should offer a great opportunity to bounce ideas around. I'm continuing to struggle with the continuum between avant-gardistes, post-avantistes, and the quiet smugness of mainstream poets--whatever the hell we mean when we put "main-stream" and "poets" together. I'm deeply interested in the making of the poem--hence the -poetics--but I find myself bristling when I'm told what I should be doing to be interesting. I especially don't like being dismissed as, essentially, 'uncool.' I mention that because I generally feel, when I visit other blogs and commentators, that my interests are not valued. I don't think I can go further than to simply articulate my impression. All the rest is strawmen and bitterness.

So I think the more useful direction to go is to reverse Hawk & Handsaw's subtitle. I've been thinking a lot about what sustains creativity. The bedrock answer is, as it is for all sustainability projects, energy. Energy, for my writing, comes from the land I'm in, the animals and other life I share the land with, and culture. All of these things add language, the material I work with, they direct my attention beyond the bony shell of my own, limited skull, and they excite the chemical-electrical wilderness of my brain. Plus, a bit of focus.

I enjoy--and appreciate--the shiny frontiers of the avants. At its best, the energy there is expansive, deep, and inclusive. There's certainly less self-righteousness about carbon neutrality. Every so often, I wish I would spend more time in (formerly) smoky bars and coffee shops, talking late into the night about the best, newest thing. But then I head out across the land and find out that I regret nothing.

 

Craning (and an award)

After a quick Skype with Wend's grandparents, we grabbed toys, packed a lunch, and headed out to Grand Island to go look at wildlife. We're at the very end of the Sandhill Crane migration season, and we saw only a very few cranes, but we did get a little stroll into a couple of acres of prairie. You might not think it (particularly if you don't live here), but it's damned hard to find any prairie left out here on the plains. Still, we saw a thirteen striped ground squirrel, meadowlarks, flickers, plovers, and ducks. Plus: cows. All of this in a steady 30 mph wind.

It seems strange to take a 75 minute car ride to spend an hour or two out of town. We struggle to find other ways to do this engagement with nonhuman nature...or at least push against the overly familiar patterns of our lives. 

We also managed to play a few board games, another obsession: Carcassonne, the Castle, and Municipium. Dana managed to work a little bit more on the socks she's knitting as we played. 

Let's make this real scattershot. I'm most of the way through Jennifer Boyden's The Mouths of Grazing Things. I'm enjoying the hell out of it. She does some very interesting jarring moments within a recognizable world. Nature, as Tim Morton would be delighted to hear, is a strange stranger. 

And the award. Right. Well, it turns out that I won the Lincoln Arts Council's Mayor's Award for Emerging Writers. This comes with a two week stay at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and a stipend. w00t!

Sounds windy out there. Always exciting.

Soggy Fires

The residents of this city take great pleasure in setting off as many cubic tons of fireworks as they can during the lead-up, day of, and exit from the Fourth of July. Nature is cooperating--without intending to--with those of us who would rather leave the explosions to the professionals by laying down a lovely, gentle rain. A nice summer soaker. While there is still a bit of small arms fire going on, it's mellowed by the sound of falling water. 

Care to discuss the effect of fireworks on the environment? Try this article from Mother Nature Network (MNN) (and be sure to read the comments, some folk seriously don't like change), another piece from the rather hardcore Chemical and Engineering News, and you might want to see what the Journal of Pyrotechnics Archive has to offer. See what you think.

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.