River of Play

Aye, Aye, Iron Bly

I've been on a bit of a break, what with the folkses here and all. I return dismayed, but willing to blunder on.

Right before my parents arrived, I was careening through Robert Bly's Eating The Honey of Words. I like the deep image work, the sort of Americanization of light, Jungian surrealism. I've never really been able to do it, but I like it when I come across it. Frequently, the deep imagery gets pulled out of the landscape, usually in the Scandinavian deeps of Minnesota. At his best, Bly seems like a version of James Wright. At his worst, he reads like a weak mix of Seamus Heaney and Gary Snyder, which is to say: he's manly (god knows) with a little Zen thrown in, the lines wander like a passionate drunk, and his sense of place is so firmly part of his persona that he neglects to actually give you helpful, unique details. Moon on snow? Now where in the world can that happen? It's an almost Kooser-esque in its Midwestern default. But he's a darling of the ecopoetry movement, so we're stuck with him.

Workin' That Ecology Thing

There's this intriguing little article over at Orion about the conflict between work and sustainability. The author points out--no surprises--that capital cares only for more capital. It depends on zeroing out the environment as a resource and then expanding profits. Now, to do this, you need to make sure that the market never reaches saturation for your product. So you've got two choices: find more markets, design obsolescence into the product. The Orion article notes that people get caught up in this as wage slaves driven to consume. . .and to have jobs that create markets or obsolescence or products so that they can afford market-driven products that are obsolete in six months. It's work that he really wants to focus on. And, yes, most "work" these days is dehumanizing and profoundly pointless. But our author wants us, somehow, to go back to the nineteenth century. Or, rather, he wants us to become thoughtful, engaged, community-focused humans. How that might happen. . . is left to the imagination. He also has some truly wacky points, like "a human society would never willingly harm nature." He acknowledges that he has no proof for this, and with good reason. Phrases like "the Dust Bowl" and "Easter Island" keep coming to mind. And for good measure: violence is a part of human nature. It's wonderfully lucky of us, though, to also have brains large enough to think violent choices through.

I've gotta stop. I could go on and on about that article. Go over and read it. It's very nice, and even if he claims, fairly regularly, that he's not naive, he's being naive.

Gah. I said I would stop. On to another topic: D and I are going to walk around the Near South Neighborhood today. There's a Tour of Homes going on, many of which are ones that we walk and/or bike past on a regular basis. We're keen to see inside. Today's forecast: clear, breezy, high of 90. Chance of oak paneling, one hundred percent.

A Short Reading

I'm putting together my ASLE paper, and I've been casting about for poems to talk about. I've picked three. The idea is that I use a handout and have the people refer to these pieces so I don't have to read them--and take up precious argument time--or refer to them in an airy, "I'm sure you all know them" way. You, you lucky people, get an early look.

The Subject of Gardening
-Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Red Clay Suite

With sharecropper sorrow,
my mother looks at the empty field,
tells you a hard story, I don’t care
what they’re trying to grow here now.
All that there used to be cotton
and it won’t give them nothing else.
Once, I labored in the garden with this woman,
her hands gritty, line of soil under her nails.
I was a careless girl loving the edible
smell of turned dirt. And who was that child
holding the grasshopper cupped in a palm?
Who made fun of beetles’ frantic scrabbling?

These days I won’t listen to the bent-backed
message in my mother’s voice.
She’ll tell me she found the road’s end
but don’t ask how she stumbled there.
I find it hard to go outside in the heat,
to keep the jade alive in its indoor pot,
to heap apologies on the browning edges,
to lay me down beside the truth of this land.

Praise
-Jimmy Santiago Baca, Black Mesa Poems

From Isleta Pueblo church
evening mass bells bellow.
Trembling gray wheat stubble,
thrashing brittle bamboo and cattails,
crackling pasture grass,
the notes trample, up Black Mesa,
down Black Mesa, great horses
dragging boulders away, their breath
the sunset that explodes
red cloud dust on the West Mesa.

Blackbirds
sing from tattered hymn books
of cottonwood branches.
Beneath them I gaze up
to their ancient altar of wood,
black-robed monks
faithful, making a pure offering of love
to the light, in one great orchestrated
lift their wings beat a black cloud
that glides over fields, spirals and swoops,
incense from an earth censor
swung by an altar boy, smoke of their flight
fills church the field is.

Syzygy
-Arthur Sze, Quipu

I notice headlight out the living-room window
then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.
I am shocked to learn that doctors collected
the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract
gonadotropins. And is that what one draws,
in infinitesimal dose, out of a vial?
I remember a steel-wool splinter in my finger
and how difficult it was to discern, extract
under a magnifying glass; yet—blue mold,
apple dropping from branch—it is hard to see
up close when, at the periphery, the unexpected
easily catches the eye. Last Thursday night,
we looked through binoculars at the full moon,
watched it darken and darken until, eclipsed,
it glowed ferrous-red. By firelight, we glowed;
my fingertips flared when I rubbed your shoulders,
softly bit your ear. The mind is a tuning fork
that we strike, and, struck, in the syzygy
of a moment, we find the skewed, tangled
passions of a day begin to straighten, align, hum.

Natural Discourse: Toward Dobrin and Weisser

Here's my review. In about 800 words.

As discussions about “place” gain momentum in English studies, a small but growing number of composition instructors have begun to assemble around the idea of “ecocomposition.” Two very visible and influential figures in the field, Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser, have written a slim book, Natural Discourses: Toward Ecocomposition, that attempts to articulate the concerns of the field. If you take nothing else away from Dobrin and Weisser, you should at least take away that they believe that any composition class—ecocomposition or other—must be about composition, about student writing, about teaching writing. They take a good half dozen other writers to task for emphasizing reading or criticism over student writing. Because ecocomposition is a young field—maybe ten years, by name—the authors work hard to underscore what it does. But more importantly, they describe the new projects, the new understandings, that make this practice important and necessary. First among their ideas is that nature is a pre-existing force on everything that has happened, is happening, will ever happen. Relatedly, they argue that ecocomposition is about context in the most profound and varied sense(s) possible. They make clear that “place” is nuanced and changing. Place is physical, but also cultural, intellectual and historical. Lastly, they see ecocomposition as a practice that continues and extends a variety of progressive composition classroom strategies and/or ideologies. Ecocomposition, as they envision it, is interdisciplinary and activist.

They offer two general approaches to the ecompositional classroom, but have very little else in the way of classroom practices. Instead, this is a book that builds a theoretical underpinning that should suggest appropriate practices. Of the classroom practices, they first discuss the “ecological literacy approach.” This has four key aspects. First, place and setting are emphasized (including non-natural places). Second, they call for multiple perspectives and disciplines, including contrary voices, in the classroom. Their third point is fairly traditional for composition: have an audience for the writing projects beyond the classroom, though they argue for understanding internet and web places as public. Lastly, in the manner of Freire, they believe that ecomposition students should be asked to be critical of their environments and should consider how their work affects that environment.

The second illustration they offer is the “ecological discourse approach,” the practice they seem to favor. Here, they ask for instructors to challenge their students to see their writing as being situated in complex, ecological relationships to their environment(s). First, this approach stresses the reciprocal position of writer and writing to each other and to the world “out there.” Second, they argue for the importance of understanding language itself as situated. They mean here that it is situated in culture and place as well as situated within sentences that are in turn situated in paragraphs, and so on. Third, they again stress that writing starts in a place. That is, before writing can be individual, can even be formed by an individual, writing is already out in the world. Thus, the ecological discourse approach will situate students in discourse. They add, later, that discourse, too, begins in place.

Dobrin and Weisser turn their attention briefly, in the final chapter, to issues surrounding rhetoric. There’s a bit of facile, verging on specious, discussion of Aristotle as an ur-eco-rhetor. They read his broad interest in natural phenomena as well as his similarly broad interest in human culture as evidence that he was a systems thinker. Natural philosophy being what it was, however, you’d be hard pressed to find any thinker who didn’t have interests as broad. More intriguing is Dobrin and Weisser’s work to reclaim the rhetorical effectiveness of pathos. They argue that emotion is an evolved response and that it develops in each person in discourse with their culture. Thus, emotion—like reason and language—should be respected in discourse. That emotion is not respected they track back, rightly, to Western cultural prejudices, and, while I applaud them, I fear that they’ve taken on a project much too large.

Natural Discourses is fairly bracing and exciting, but it spins its wheels in places. It could have been better organized, perhaps with more chapters. As it is, it reads as if it needs a bit of editing. I would have liked to have seen more examples of the ecocomposition classroom. They could have used that space to work through some difficult issues about urban environments, race, class and gender. It’s not that they ignore these issues, but their discussions are cursory, particularly compared to their critiques of other essays that have been labeled as being about ecocomposition (their universal critique: too much about reading, not enough about writing). The most generous reading is that much remains to be done when it comes to the teaching of ecocomposition, particularly when envisioned by these two early theorists and practitioners.

In Which There Are a Variety of Updates

Let's see. . .

Weird dreams about the ex, the competition is almost silent, there are rumors about Carnegie Hall, TAs are being renewed. . .

Even more ellipses? . . . maybe.

D is in the air to New Orleans. The process of which was made a bit trickier by a mid spring snow storm in Minneapolis and Chicago. People are driving from Chicago to Omaha so they can continue their business travels. Oh, the middle of the country is a fucking mess. For travel. As an example of global warming. Oh, wait, too small a sample.

But here's a scary moment from yesterday: Our avuncular Iowa speaker very cheefully said, "So this guy says we've pretty much seen the end of the world for humans." And kept going. Tra-la-la. It doesn't help that I'm watching Children of Men out of the corner of my eye.

Let me catch my breath.

So. Dobrin and Weisser continued. . . This is a book that's about half as long as it actually is. When you find yourself defending your straw man structures, just fucking cut that section out. I like the book, I like what they're trying to do, but the piece feels like it should have been a monograph for SWR. There's a whole lot of repetition--it turns out that composition classes should be less about reading and more, much more--entirely--, about teaching writing. I'm in about 130 pages, and they've not started writing about classroom practices. This strategy may be cautious, but I'm losing patience. So. I'm going to write a review that says it's an important book, and that's true, but it could be better. Can those categories co-exist? I sigh.

And after I sigh, I turn to the poetry. Audre Lorde continues to get better as I move through her career. I wonder about my own, though. Not feeling sanguine about the work right about now. But I'm going to turn from the gorgeous, drenched images of the movie to words. Words on a page. I'm all about the black and white.

Reading, Writing, and. . . More of Same

Still in the Lorde book. The next section, Coal, opens a more experimental approach. There's a lot of looping and repetition that supports and expands on the obsession and anger of the earlier books. And the repetitions aren't anaphoric. Rather, they shift and move with their reiteration. Very nice.

I'm also still in the Natural Discourses book. Right now, they're being very charming about insisting that ecocomposition is different from ecocriticism--though they might share a basic philosophy and set of interests--in that ecocomp is always about writing. Producing texts. You might do a bit of criticism in both fields, might be interested in cultural studies in both, might trace discourse in both, but ecocomp is about fucking writing, godammit. I like these guys. Except for their misreading of Eskimo words for snow. Christ, that that thing were dead and I in my bed again.

Last, I received a terrible, terrible thing in the mail. A catalog. For MIT Press's Environment titles. I can tell that I need Ted Turner's money and isolated cabin so I can settle in to read. Pretty much for the rest of my life.

Updates and Extended Conversations

It seems that Typepad has updated their "typelists" menus. At least for books. Even smoother than before. Nice job, Typepad. It's so nice when the software gets easier with each iteration.

Around school, though, every conversation I get in is about ecocomposition or ecopoetry. This isn't a bad thing, simply surprising and a bit gratifying. My colleagues seem interested in what I have to say and this comes as a shock. I'm still trying to live my evangelical upbringing where if god didn't say it, your opinion on it doesn't matter. And by "god says it" we mean that you can find it in a book. Oh, I'm going to go off on a tangent here if I'm not careful.

Last note: I've been reading Audre Lorde in and among all the other things I've been doing. The general lack of punctuation underscores her control of the poems, but that lack is also a stylistic mark for a lot of her generation of poets. I'm most interested, so far, in her view of the city in her New York Headshop poems. I like the way she engages the setting for the poems. It's a mind at work artistically within a particular place. I'm curious to see if that continues with her work.

Very last note: D and I went to see Neko Case last night at the Rococo. Good show, and we got some socialing in before the concert. We're signed up for the Old Crow Medicine Show in two weeks. Stop by our table. We'll drink very large bourbons.

It's Back!

A series of misunderstandings meant that I only got my computer back today. The last of these amusements was when I dropped by the shop yesterday.

"Dude," the guy said, "I didn't realize your drive was full. I thought you were just swapping out a dead one. The transfer's going to take a while. It'll be done at, like," he looks at the transfer rate, "six." It was four.

That would explain why I was getting a larger hard drive installed. Plus, more RAM. Which I"ve now maxed out for the machine. So it's a lot faster, now, and it's sucking battery juice like a mosquito on a vein. Ah, well, balance must be preserved.

The panel went well. We had good attendance, close to twenty, and some people I'd not thought would attend. It's a rough piece, but I'll post it below. The outline at the end reflects how some people use these ideas in their classroom. You might note that in the body of the presentation at least two of the theorists critique the "walk in the woods" assignment. Which means, look! it's an evolving practice!

James Engelhardt

In an interview in Writing Environments, edited by Sidney Dobrin and Christopher Keller, Cheryl Glotfelty offers a complicated definition of place (not because it’s long): “A place is a relationship of land and stories about land. A place is a dynamic concept. Places are always being made” (269). I’m going to be talking mostly about ecomposition and ecopoetry pedagogy and as I discuss a handful of theorists and practitioners, I hope you’ll see the idea of place is not an easy one that we can take to mean a long, loving, naïve relationship to an untroubled landscape.
One way to get students engaged with place that seems to be gaining popularity, at least in this literature and this department, is mapping. Derek Owens, in Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation, writes about starting each semester with student-drawn maps (a practice I’ve started to use in my own poetry classes). He starts the chapter with his own meditation on where he lives, starting with the effects of glaciation. He then uses selections from student work to talk about where his students live in relation to the commuter campus school where he teaches. I like that he gives them space in the chapter, even as he then unpacks each of their observations. He then takes a look at the institution. What can space/place mean to academics? This building, for example, was not designed with an English department in mind. The campus is home to some native species, but the rest all need water and fertilizer to survive. Only advanced students get to have their own offices, which is to say that undergrads are allowed into the building but not allowed to stay. How committed can we be?
Nedra Reynolds asks similar questions in her Geographies of Writing. The complex ways she thinks and writes about place in the academy beyond English studies is quite delightful. She notes that academic institutions are thought of as democratic places of learning (at least, now they are) and research that welcome students from all walks of life. Yet the bureaucracies, structures and even the buildings themselves can be imposing and Byzantine to the point of exclusionary. And seem designed that way. She also has a mapping assignment. Her assignment asking students to map their campus, to choose a chunk of it, explore it, and make a map. I believe that this was a small group undertaking. The students came back with stories of professors and administrative personnel who blew them off, though grad students seemed to be friendly. She recognizes that there’s a Rashomon quality to their reports, but she adds that she got calls from some of the professors who complained about students wandering in to ask questions.
First generation students, minority students at a campus, the ways that financial aid paperwork and professionals don’t help. Learning to trust money people if you come from working class or poverty. The bursar’s office designed, here, to look like bank tellers.
To keep the cartography theme going for a bit longer, Julie Drew, in the Weisser and Dobrin edited Ecomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, writes about maps and place as crucial to critical consciousness (we are always conscious and engaged in a place). She argues for seeing students as travelers, from classroom to other institutional spaces (dorms, libraries, apartments), all of which are contested outside of the “contact zones” of prof and student (57). The map works to make these places clearer. Working on this kind of project allows students to develop interests and to make themselves more individual for their professors, more human.
Other essays expand on this idea, even if they don’t use the map as an exercise. Christian Weisser emphasizes that we are always in a place that is always connected to the rest of the world (81). Arlene Plevin argues that place puts student concerns first, that place allows students to develop their own interests while simultaneously developing critical consciousness (148). That is, as students begin to think about place in the complicated, fluid way that Kolodny suggested way back at the beginning of this presentation, they find the ways that place is constructed, the discourses that move through and over that place, the issues that are core to that place. Edward Lotto explores the idea nature as constructed and no longer “pure” and suggests that meaningful engagement with nature is possible (nature as a real thing out there in the world), especially if this conflicted, both/and position is taken into account (253). That is, this complex relationship is the very nature of nature, if you will, and working through the issues and ecology is how critical consciousness is shaped.
For a lot of the country, an issue that’s at the core of any place is race, itself a complicated subject. Christopher Keller, still in the same collection of essays, raises questions about race and ecocomp, how place and race have a vexed relationship in the US. The gist of his piece suggests—not explicity—that many of the “take a walk in the woods” assignments and essays are problematic (193). I think that it’s important to interrogate that kind of writing assignment, but more important is an interrogation of racism as place-based. And that’s a whole big subject.
Annette Kolodny, in an interview collected by the ubiquitous Sidney Dobrin (this time working with Christopher Keller) in their book Writing Environments, speaks about the importance of writing as a way to shape thought (9), the importance of environmental work as justice work (19), and trying to make the university habitable and welcoming in her own work as an administrator (28). The last item resonates with the concerns of Derek Owens and Nedra Reynolds as I talked about earlier, while the first two—writing to shape thinking and environmental work as justice work—continue to expand on how ecocompositionists see their work as adding to, even extending, the work of critical pedagogy. And Kolodny is certainly pointing out ways to pick up the issues of race that Keller touches on. Eric Otto, in a different section of the book, writes about ecocomposition as being a furthering of post-process comp theory in that ecocomp extends the interest in “non-codifiable, social dimensions of written discourse” to examine the “relationship between writers and their surroundings” (143).
It’s important, in all of this, to note that this is not a movement that sees looking at place or engaging with nature as a look back. This is not about nostalgia. Maybe for some people. But in the same Dobrin and Keller collection of interviews, both Janisse Ray and Scott Russell Sanders argue for environmental writing (Ray’s term) and nature writing (Sanders’s term) as a template and vision for the future.
It’s in concert with that kind of claim that Dobrin and Weisser in Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition make this big claim by “Ecocomposition posits that environment precedes race, gender and culture” (x). That is, place influences any understanding and interpretation of those categories, even the construction of these categories. They also make this appeal for interdisciplinarity (Derek Owens would also read this as a call for sustainability, but that’s a topic for another day): “[w]e prefer to view the role of ecocompositionists as intellectual travelers who explore new territories in an effort to change themselves, taking nothing but experiences and knowledge […]. Ecocompositionists delve into ecological and environmental studies not to extend our territory in the intellectual landscape, but to improve our understanding of the connections between these related disciplines, discourses and epistemologies” (4). As I read it, it’s a call for cooperation, an invitation to other disciplines to feedback to ours in a way that might, that should, expand our understanding of place.

At a panel at this year’s AWP, there was a lot of talk about

Implications of all this for the workshop.
taking hikes—class period or day-long
(outside strolling breaks teaching hierarchy; students can use their skills and abilities from their own lives, not as scholars; fuels writing by offering details and situations)
individual fieldtrips (focus on solitary)
pick out of a hat, assigned, or chosen from a list
set up and setting of trip with class texts is important
allows for contact with the non-human
students: bring a natural object to class
why is it natural? how can you tell it came from nature? (holds its pattern as it grows)
why is the form interesting?
bring a form that reflects where you are as a writer

from Didion’s “At the Dam” and “Death of a Moth”:
a small thing that affects you largely
a place you visited briefly that keeps coming back to you
creates important of place and makes that importance clear to students

Place based: get pissed off about something
transform the world by how we speak it
writing back to policy
policy is part of how humans craft/relate to land/place

ecopo, etc not only in wilderness

And let me say, as I was pasting this in, just how much faster this laptop is. It will tear the treads off your tires.

Even Ooze Can Make a Good Decision

Clicking out of my hotmail, I came across this discussion in Newsweek. I think the evangelical comes off badly, but then I always think that.

In other news, the storms that have blasted through here over the last couple of days have dumped measurable fractions of inches of fresh, dark green grass on the city. I'm hearing a robin call over the drone of the first lawn mowing of the season.

Lastly, I've finished the presentation for Tuesday. I'll be talking for a bit about deep mapping--or just mapping in general--as a way for students to engage place in ways that sets up the work of critical pedagogy. That is, getting students to see the discourses and power dynamics around them and understand their own complicity/enmeshment. Ecocompositionists want to students to see that positioning as always in a particular place. It'll be fun. Come on and see.

Working and Joining

At least the new RAM is in and added to the work order.  Nevertheless, my phone stubbornly refuses to ring and summon my down to the 501 building so that I can revel in the joy that is a refurbished laptop.  I will share this joy with you when the time comes. 

A current joy is, of course, NPR pledge drive season.  D and I did our pledging last night.  Don't be slack, now.  Go and support your local radio station.  Though I'm anxious about tonight's Fresh Air.  The guy who directs the National Genome Project. . . and an evangelical.

I've continued to do the reading for the presentation on Tuesday (and I've just found out that since I'm the only committee member available for the talk, I'll be moderating, also.  Not so bad, but it is to make me sigh).  I find that, as usual, I'm using the material from composition to inform and challenge my thinking about the creative writing classroom.  In this case, ecocomp for ecopoetry.  How to get students to think about their place as part of the web of influences that shapes their identity.  You're in a welter of culture and most comp material, particularly of the critical pedagogy school, tries to help students see those influences, to understand how culture is produced and how it prods and shapes us.  Until very recently, though, few people were asking about where the culture is coming from, where the students are living and learning.  It wasn't so long ago that talking about student bodies seemed revolutionary, and now the ecocomp camp want us to consider where those bodies are.  Little cinderblock boxes?  Why?  If we're in a bureaucracy, does the architecture reinforce that?  Farther out, does the landscape of the school fit the landscape of the region?  And with that question, you open a whole new set of questions about place and placed-ness for students and universities. 

And these are just some of the questions I'm hoping to talk about at this panel and then again at MMLA. 
And if you know any prayers that lead IT guys to a path of righteousness in RE: my laptop, send 'em along.