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.
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