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. 

Comments

[cheap oakley sunglasses]

River of Play: Another Bit of Diss

[Cheap NFL Jerseys]

Highly energetic blog, I enjoyed that bit. Will there be a part 2?

[do they wear uggs paris]

canada goose 100 euros doudoune canada goose femme prix canada goose tremblant jacket canada goose parka veste canada goose canada goose femme boutique canada goose canada gooes canada goose vendre canada goose soldes paris canada goose 510 canada goose magasin paris canada goose pas cher homme doudoune goose parka goose m vente de botte ugg canada jacket canada goose achat fausse canada goose particulier annonce canada goose bottes ugg suisse vente privée canada goose grand comptoir canada goose annonce fausse canada goose canada goose chilliwack homme prix parka canada goose pas cher fausse canada goose particulier canada goose femmes wholesale canada goose annonce fausse canada goose doudoune canada goose pas cher femme vente boutique canada goose paris ugg prix tunisie canada goose manteaux canada goose chilliwack bomber homme canada goose noire doudoune canada goose chilliwack femme doudoune canada goose chilliwack femme canada goose montebello parka canada goose femme parka.
do they wear uggs paris http://www.scigenics.in/cp/uggclassic/index.php?/do-they-wear-uggs-paris-ugg-pas-ch??re-bottes-uggs-hello-kitty/

[canada goose marron pas cher]

canada goose factory canada goose xs marque canada goose ugg chaussure acheter doudoune canada goose acheter canada goose quebec canada goose solaris doudoune canada goose pas cher enfant parka canada goose kensington femmes doudoune pyrenex canada goose chilliwack femme canada goose chilliwack parka canada goose paris prix magasin canada goose neuilly doudoune canada goose homme adresse magasin canada goose montreal canada goose alberta vest ugg prix magasin canada goose bomber canada goose expedition parka canada goose hat canada goose marron canada goose femme occasion canada gooze canada gooes canada goose doudoune avis trouver boutique ugg france canada goose chilliwack femme acheter canada goose suisse echange canada goose vente cordes canada goose bottes ugg nice canada goose paris citadium contrefacon canada goose canada goose expedition parka canada goose taille xs neuve canada goose heli arctic parka canada goose chilliwack bomber men parka grand froid canada canada goose occasion.
canada goose marron pas cher http://www.homadefoods.com/Pages/index.asp?p=2690