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.

The Ecopoetry Anthology

I've been talking with Ann Fischer-Wirth about this anthology project for years, and it's great to see it's out and available. 

And if you click over here, you'll see a fantastic interview by a fantastic poet, Derek Sheffield. Is ecopoetry necessary? Hell yes!

 

 

Punctuated Migration

I wrote an essay/meditation/scholarly piece a few years back about punctuated migration, the contemporary practice of moving every few years (once a decade, maybe) that might well start in childhood. This situation sets those of us interested in place-based writing into a strange situation: if we’re not a dirt elite (been on one piece of land for generations), then how can we write while holding any kind of claim to the place? My argument boils down to respect and openness, a listening curiosity.

In the piece, I argue that we take our places with us, but we—that is, anyone interested in the pattern of punctuated migration while maintaining place-based interests—must avoid letting those places from our past overwhelm the present. We need to let the new places speak clearly. That attitude is especially important in my role (now, not so new) as an editor, and there’s something about this place, Alaska, that has a lot to listen to.

I count myself lucky, of course, that so much of that conversation comes into my office. It’s a unique experience, I think, for a cheechako moving up to learn so much about the place so quickly. And from so many different directions: poetry, snow science, history, geography… The list goes on.

The next step, though, is connecting back. What did those other places, those other landscapes, people, and his history give to me that I can take into this place? I’m beginning to develop some answers. I’ve been thinking a lot about agriculture and Alaska, and about the complicated sense of being overlooked while also being criticized. So I’ve imported some of the Midwest and Appalachia, but I’m always looking for how Alaska diverges from where I’ve been, trying to hear the place on its own.

Here’s the difficult part of the listening: Alaska is simply too large to contain. As someone in the Interior, I don’t have access to the ocean. Or the oil fields to the north. We get far less snow than the Gulf, and we’re not even close to the amount of rainfall the rain forests get. In short, still a lot of listening to be done.

Alaska and Punctuated Migration

I'll start by mentioning my recent--was it a week-and-a-half ago already?--reading for the UAF Midnight Sun Visiting Writer Series. The craft talk (Like an Off-Tempo Waltz: Writers and Editors) went well. Dinner at one of the local Thai restaurants was tasty. And the reading was well-attended enough that they had to add extra rows for the audience. It helped immensely that the other guy reading is the new Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. And it doesn't hurt that darkness comes early.

The reading reminded me of one of the core tensions for any place-based ecopoet: how do you start writing again after a move?

I read from my "Boomtown" manuscript, and several audience members talked to me afterward about their love of the midwest and Great Plains, and the difficulty they experienced expressing that affection--that identity--with people outside the region. Their reactions (and prepping for the reading) have helped me return to the manuscript with renewed energy. But with two sobering changes. First, I've had the feeling--and then the actual wording--that a book so closely focused on a town that is in flyover country won't garner any publisher interest. So I've had to scrub out some of the tight focus and reference. I'm deeply ambivalent about this shift. Second, I've moved to a new place.

That move really drives a deep engagement with a topic I've wrestled with, written about, and knew I had to face again: punctuated migration. I'm not one of the dirt elite (those lucky few who managed to live on the same land as their ancestors--and not as sharecroppers, freedmen (and women), or other marginalized population), and I live in the most mobile era of human existence, so I'm pretty much guaranteed not to spend my life in one place. So, as I've already mentioned: how to start writing again in this place?

The natural drama, aesthetic appeal, charismatic megafauna, ragged edge of civilization components don't help. It seems too easy, almost, like you could get lazy writing in a place like this with its fjords, granite ranges, polar bears, dog sleds, profound winters, northern lights... Zounds! What's not to love? And yet, that kind of surface can be blinding--and I'm of course most interested in the metaphorical way it can be blinding. Having grown up in an area of great physical beauty, and a concomitant tourist industry, I'm suspicious of surfaces. 

The dilemma then is that I very much want to get writing, but I don't trust my first reading, my first engagement (foxes and beavers on the way to work, black bears on the trail along the backyards, moose closing off lanes of traffic!). The great thing about my job is that a lot of research comes to me, so I'm learning a lot about the place quickly. As you might expect from a place so large, though, the diversity of climate and peoples is--well, it's as stark in its diversity as any chunk of land that you can separate into distinct regions. Barrow and Ketchikan both have water right next to the town, but they might as well be on different worlds (compare their weather forecasts, for starters).

And I'm on a different planet, entirely, here in the interior. So I wait. I listen. I try to get people to talk to me (not hard to do in my job). I start to think about travel, space, light, the choices any of us might make to come up here. 

There's poetry in that. 

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.  

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.

 

Dropping In?

So the earth is cranking past equinox to show it lovely northern face to the sun. Seems like a good time to start cranking this blog up again, too. We'll see how long it lasts...

I'm off to the U of Northern Iowa in a few weeks to talk about ecopoetics and then it's off to ASLE several more weeks after that. It feels good to be in the ecopoetry circles. AWP has felt much more comfortable now that I've found my tribe, for instance. 

The first ecopoetry project, "Boomtown," is out to a few publishers and contests. We'll see how that goes. I'm delighted that about a quarter of it so far has been selected for publication (you can see selections up at Terrain.org). And now I have a second project going. Set in and around Lincoln, I'm trying to pull some cultural archetypes together. So I'm into Plains folklore, Native American myth and folklore, and, for a touch of international cultural ecology, Taoist immortals. At the very least, it's a ton of fun.

And speaking of fun (ah, the art of the segue), the games essays continue to develop, morph, and just generally get written.

Yesterday afternoon: a flock of deep-crimson chested robins foraging at the corner of 20th and B. The great horned owl I saw a couple of weeks ago clearly wasn't around.  

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.