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. 

Comments

[Benjamin]

James, your tials and tribulatiosn with research--and how it forms a moving narative of place--sounds so very much like my current struggles with a memoir of my immigrant family in the 1870s. The research the gets me excited is what's available--science, history, et cetera--but where's the human connection in place? Often in food and shelter, but the stories of the day to day are gone, and so, as you say, fiction must play a role so that the "I" narrator doesn't take on too much of a central role. Interesting reading today....