River of Play

New Places

I'm really just getting used to using the blog space again, but I do need a bit of content. I'm open to suggestions...

We're getting settled into new patterns and new community here in Champaign. Much warmer, of course, and so much more humid. Fewer willows--and types of willows--but it's comforting to see the hardwoods again.

On Labor Day, one of Dana's new colleagues came over for wine and conversation. She did her MFA work, and a little extra, at UAF, so we talked about Fairbanks and Alaska. Years ago, I had a friend group that contained a small side collection of people who had lived in Prague at about the same time. They would occasionally clump up at parties and talk about living there. Our Alaska conversation felt a lot like that. The place doesn't feel like the rest of the US, and living there is transformative. 

 

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.

Stumbling to Equinox

I’ve lost track of time, I think. How long have we lived in this place?

Part of the losing track comes from recognition of home, learning the rhythms of where we live. We’ve had overnight lows in the 20s recently. It’s finally dark enough to see the auror a when I’m up and getting breakfast ready. Fishing is tapering off, the berries are about done, and people are coming back with moose, caribou, and sheep.

Of course, I like this feeling that I know the equinox is coming and that everyone around me knows it, too. We’re a bit anxious about winter, but we’re also looking forward to skiing, snowshoeing, sledding—the excuses to double the hot chocolate and add a bit more brandy.

The patterns feel like an old rhythm, like patterns any of our ancestors would recognize, even if they wouldn’t recognize the snow tires and gore-tex. Or the planning for ways to protect iPods on a winter ramble.

Maybe it’s the gray that has me feeling expansive. Gray in the sky, gold on the leaves. A little woodsmoke. I think I’ll stop for wine on the way home. Join me, won’t you?

Learning the Family of Mountains

Labor Day 2013, and we’re just back from a recent trip down and up to Hatcher Pass, a former gold mining community tucked high up in the Talkeetna Mountains near Anchorage. We learned a couple things on this trip, our first vacation not centered on extended family. 

The first and best thing we learned is that Wendy is a patient and fun car traveler. We had prepared, of course. Snacks, drinks, toys, books, colored pencil, paper: the weapons and armor to fend off tedium. But still, six hours? The last hour had us climbing 3000 feet in elevation, so it was beautiful and distracting. 

Roadside, looking down at the old mine. Note the lack of guardrail.

It was also my most harrowing hour. A steep climb. On narrow, gravel roads. And here’s the detail that had me sweating the sour sweat of rehab or fear: no guardrails. Probably a thousand foot dropoff in places, and I’ll repeat: no guardrails. A bit of a thrill for all of us.

We learned that you need to get your kid—or we need to get our kid—involved in the planning of the trip. She’s happy to roll along, but we got the sense that she would have been happier if she had a hand in the planning. 

We learned more about rain.

Specifically, we learned that rain is not so friendly when you’re in a different city. I had scouted out several parks that offered hiking and climbing (pretty much, a park with trees and rocks offers climbing for a preschooler), and had highlighted a couple of parks with kidfrastructure—slides, swings, and non-organic climbing equipment. Kincaid Park, which apparently hosts world cup cross-country skiing, had a lot of good running space, hills to climb, and even a small network of slides and equipment. It also had a steady

At Eagle River Nature Center. Some Chugach peaks.

drizzle and a constant wind from off Cook Inlet. We could walk a bit, climb a tall hill overlooking the inlet, and play on the equipment. Except for the slide, which had been installed with the final foot heading uphill, making it a sort of spoon. Not so good on a rainy day. 

The rest of the trip featured similar rain events. We could shuffle through rain to museums, restaurants, or shops, but we never got enough of a break to leave our hoods down and frolic. Or, more to the point, let Wendy frolic.

We also learned to cut our losses. Too much rain, not enough frolic makes for an unhappy kid. She didn’t ask for it, but we decided to go home a day early. A little bit sad, but in fact a good choice. We were more relaxed, and we got a chance to go berry-picking that Sunday. 

While we stayed in the Talkeetnas, we crossed the Alaska Range, and ventured into the Chugach Range. The mountains will still be there when we go back. And we'll probably learn even more about ourselves as a family.

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.

 

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.

 

 

Turn of the Seasons

The last two months have been moving too fast for me to keep any sort of posting up to date. During the first week of April, the University of Alaska Press posted a job listing for a new acquisitions editor. I was encouraged by friends, colleagues, and mentors to apply--the job certainly sounded good to me--so pulled my resume and application letter together and entered the market. 

A week after the job closed, I got a call to schedule an interview. The next week.

After a harried weekend studying the U of Alaska Press, I interviewed. I thought it went pretty well, and  week later I got an email asking to schedule a call to talk about the job.

By the end of the week, we had reached a deal. I think that was the sixth of May. We decided that June 13 would be a good start date, so we've been running around like possessed people trying to extract ourselves from Lincoln and find a way to insert ourselves into Fairbanks, AK. We've been 
busy lining up housing, and I've been training my replacement at the magazine.

A week from today, I roll out of Lincoln and head north through the Dakotas before tacking northwest across Canada and on into Alaska.

We're looking forward to learning about this new, and very different, landscape. And... Well, just about everything. We'd be more excited if we weren't so frantic.

And right now, I should head home and keep packing.

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.