River of Play

The Language Habitat: an Ecopoetry Manifesto

Ecopoetry is connection.  

It’s a way to engage the world by and through language. This poetry might be wary of language, but at its core believes that language is an evolved ability that comes from our bodies, that is close to the core of who we are in the world. Ecopoetry might borrow strategies and approaches from postmodernism and its off-shoots, depending on the poet and their interests, but the ecopoetic space is not a postmodern space. An ecopoem might play with slippages, but the play will lead to further connections.

Ecopoetry does share a space with science. One of the concerns of ecopoetry is non-human nature (it shares this concern with the critical apparatus it borrows from, ecocriticism). It certainly shares that concern with most of the world’s history of poetry: How can we connect with non-human nature that seems so much more, so much larger than ourselves? How can we understand it? One way is to laud nature unrealistically. Another is to praise of the human control of nature. Ecopoetry, though, pushes past the traditions of the pastoral or the georgic; as in science, nature is neutral and can only be approached with the understanding that non-human nature will forever remain non-human. It is profoundly Other and starkly confronts us with what it means to be human. As poets, we can approach and explore non-human nature, but the connection will always retreat. Science, however, allows the poet to name things carefully. And it looks into the mind that makes and reads poems and points the poet toward compositional, structural, and aesthetic strategies.

Some ecopoetry wishes to engage nature as a spiritual space, but we live in bodies, not spirit. We can only speak from a bodied connection to the world. The body is a genetic space as well, and that means that family is a natural concern of ecopoetry. The family that came before us, the family around us, the family we create and that will outlive us. Families form culture, they connect us to culture; they are where culture begins. Families come out of histories and places. Thus, a successful family ecopoem must look outside the immediate, constrained concerns of the nuclear family.        

The ecopoem must connect to the culture and society that it inhabits. You might ask, How can it not? But when thinking about an ecology, it’s easy to overlook aspects of the system, including the largest aspects. Culture is a product of evolution; it is a product of non-human nature, yet we recognize it as our own, human product. The ecopoem must contend with this paradox; it must connect here. Culture. Non-human nature. It is around these indissoluble differences that ecopoetics searches for the transitional phases, the ecotones, the shifting boundaries that yield language, insight, struggle. But of course these differences aren’t differences at all. We are natural beings building cities as naturally as bees build hives. Unlike the bee, however, we are aware of the hives we build, why we built them, how they connect, intellectually, to other hives, other people. Also unlike the bee, when we look to other creatures, we understand that we cannot know them. Thus, the differences swirl back up to surround us and the search for poetry begins again.      

The ecopoem is connected to the world, and this implies responsibility. Like other poetic models that assume a connection and engagement (feminism, Marxism, witness, etc.), ecopoetry is surrounded by questions of ethics. Should the ecopoem do something in the world? But how can a poem be said to accomplish anything? Or is that position only of a poetics that recognizes only aesthetics? Is there a rhetoric to ecopoetry? Can the ecopoem be compelling as an object and as a political call? Is the meaning of non-human nature stable? Does—can it?—have a meaning at all? These are questions that remain open, that the community of ecopoets must track down, investigate, turn their minds to again and again.

Lastly, the ecopoem must connect to the human capacity to play. More so even than our animal cousins, we are creatures who play. Ecopoems must allow our full range of joy and experimentation as we try to connect to our world and the other creatures here with us. Play allows for interdependent coevolution that explores the contingent within connection, that lets the mind roam without limit. Play reveals deep connections.  

Even as we try to understand and make sense of a world that will ultimately evade us, as we decide what responsibility we should exercise, as we work to bring culture and science into our work, ecopoets must remember our bodies, our families, and push the range of our language.

Resisting Despair

In a recent opinion piece over at the Chronicle, Pascal Bruckner argues for ecologism (a sort of conservation-minded ideology) as the new hairshirt for the world. Tales of ecological collapse—driven by humans and their desires—evoke a guilt as heavy and unavoidable as original sin.

We, those affected by such dolor, need to get a grip. We need to shake off our despair and embrace progress. Bruckner rallies around this call:

A race has begun between the forces of despair and those of human ingenuity. In other words, the remedy is found in the disease, in the despised industrial civilization, the frightening science, the endless crisis, the globalization that exceeds our grasp: Only an increase in research, an explosion of creativity, or an unprecedented technological advance will be able to save us. We have to try to push back the boundaries of the possible by encouraging the most fantastic initiatives, the most mind-boggling ideas. We have to transform the increasing scarcity of resources into a wealth of inventions.

Shame! And get a sweater.

 

As well as this final flourish: “Above all, we have to save the world from its self-proclaimed saviors, who brandish the threat of great chaos in order to impose their lethal impulses.”

The piece left me thinking that maybe an American raised outside of Catholicism doesn’t feel the weight of guilt drag so heavily. Or maybe it’s that I don’t mind taking short showers and wearing sweaters. Or it may be that I don’t participate enough in the mainstream of my culture and so the messages he resists are muted for me. And, really, “lethal impulses”?

I’ll say this, though, bootstrapping isn’t the answer. Our ability to leverage our technology seems suspect at best (I’ll just reach back to Alfred Nobel to get the ball rolling). However, I agree that “What is at stake is the pleasure of living together on this planet that will survive us, whatever we do to it.” And we certainly need “trailblazers and stimulators” to insure that survival. But there’s a balance to be found, and the search for that balance is not served well by Bruckner.

Oh, and the comments are lively!

Very Emerald, Not So Licious

The editor comments are back. Substantial but not unfair. In our defense, Jeremy and I generated 10k words in two weeks. We were expecting heavy notes, and so it wasn't a shock to return to the essay. But it's still a lot of work. 

And ASLE is wrapping up. My tribe--and Jeremy's--disbanding for another two years. So I'm in a deeply ecocritical state of mind that doesn't shut off when I'm reading books to Wendy.

Enter The Apple-Pip Princess and Emeraldalicious.

The former is a kind of re-telling of theParable of the Talents. The daughter, in this version, who wins approval works hard with her mother's magic to re-grow the kingdom. In Emeraldalicious--

I'll cut to the chase: how epic is this fail?

The book is another in the "-alicious" franchise begun by Pinkalicious. The art is intriguingly awkward and the story--for the first one--is unsteady and perhaps objectionable. Perhaps not. So we've read other books in the series because they get high-profile launches and library space, and they're fine, I guess, if forgettable.

Short answer: epic.

In this book, Pink and her brother are in a park. They discover a trash heap (not Marjory) in their favorite part of the park and use egocentrism and magic to remove the garbage. Now, I could spend a bit of time going over the details of the fail, but I'll narrow it down to one criticism: Change takes work--not magic, not wishing. I don't mind magic in a story, and if magic had helped her to contact all her friends to come help clean up the park, then I wouldn't be all cranky (in this scenario, Twitter=magic). Change isn't magic. It's us.

I had Dana read it with the only preface being that I was suspicious. She put it down at the end and tucked it back into the libary bag. She only raised an eyebrow at me. We've talked about it, of course, but it's the beauty of libraries: you don't own the books.

 

Over the Silence

I've been filling my free time with the revival of a project I had thought long-abandoned. My colleague (and good friend) JD Schraffenberger and I had put together a proposal for an

Bonus: Cranes in Fairbanks. Very close to what Wendy and I saw yesterday at Creamer's Field.

ecopedagogy chapter of a creative writing pedagogy anthology. The book proposal got bounced around, finally picked up, and then our chapter got cut. Alas. 

Ah! But two weeks ago we were contacted by the editors asking if we'd put the chapter together; another participant had to withdraw. So I've been crashing back into the world of ecocriticism, pedagogy, and all things academic.

It's been quite exciting, actually. Nice to remember that I actually (shameful admission) liked grad school.

Right. The kicker: it's due June 1. So we're typing furiously into Google Docs.

I also have some thoughts on the future of books, or where we are with ebooks, or some other thoughts along those lines, but I'll get to them later.

The Annual Barbaric AWP

AWP season never ends. They start taking proposals about a week after the conference ends, then book fair reservations start, and then the hotels open. A wearying ouroboros.

But also quite fun.

The Seattle AWP will be my tenth, but I have friends who remember when under a hundred people were getting together for the conference. Can that be right?

There’s a flurry of activity up here for panel organization. We are finally part of the regional interest. And we’re interested in being interested. I know because pretty much every writer I know here is planning on attending.

Of course, plans and actual attendance are two different things. Because even though Seattle is the next airport south of Anchorage (actually, that would be Hawaii, but work with me), it’s still over two thousand miles away. We think about that a lot.

Book Fair at Boston

 

Before we moved up here, we told friends and colleagues that moving to Alaska in the 21^st century isn’t like moving to Alaska in the 20^th century. And we’ve been right about that. We have serviceable internet, so that makes up for a lot of distance. Skype, cell phones, Amazon, moose, lynx, wolves—we’ve got it all, baby.

But we’re still a long, long way from the Lower 48.

Mostly, that fact is easy to ignore. We go on our own strange way and ignore the rest of the country. But we do try to be part of the conversation, which is where AWP comes in. We have this feeling that we’re easy to ignore even as reality television programming keeps adding Alaska content. So we’ll wave our hands and see who stops by to listen.

And remember: proposals are due by May 1.

Organizer tip: Read the proposal book and successful descriptions
!

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.

 

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. 

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.