by Lynn Keller
Yet the tremendous popularity of both poets’ work suggests that poems like these help readers in very different situations from the poets’ imagine themselves as taking solace and finding wonder or delight even where they might not actually do so. In providing this imagined experience, the poems may foster values associated with environmental conservation. As Scott Slovic observes, “nature writing is a ‘literature of hope’ in its assumption that the elevation of consciousness may lead to wholesome political change.”30 And even if conservation is, appropriately, no longer the sole focus of environmentalism, it nonetheless remains crucial in the immediate Anthropocene; we desperately need the carbon sequestration provided by the world’s forests, for example (currently about 20 percent of the world’s oxygen is released by rainforests), and many scientific arguments can be offered for the importance of preserving not just individual species but entire ecosystems with the biodiversity they contain. Poems like these, then, can support ends valued by a range of environmentalists.31 Yet nature poetry alone, especially work like Oliver’s that presents nature’s “true gift” as lying in its unchanging patterns,32 is an insufficient poetic response to the radical instabilities of the environmental mess in which we find ourselves.
ECOPOETICS OF THE SELF-CONSCIOUS ANTHROPOCENE: “WING/SPAN/SCREW/CLUSTER (AVES)”
This book will therefore focus on writing, often more or less experimental, that moves beyond or transforms the conventions of nature poetry. As an example, I will now introduce another poem that takes birds as its subject. In the poems by Berry and Oliver just discussed, watching or being near birds in the wild reminded the speakers of the perfections of nonhuman wild creatures or of the sublime peacefulness of the natural realm they inhabit. This third poem, however, represents birds quite differently, as it offers a critique of the kinds of transcendence, long associated with birds’ flight, of which Cronon is wary. Using disjunctive construction and asyntactic language, often derived from the Internet and formatted to evoke domain names, this poem from Evelyn Reilly’s volume Styrofoam (2009), titled “Wing/Span/Screw/Cluster (Aves),” attends to anthropogenic planetary change while it adapts collage poetics indebted to the techniques of high modernism to an ecological model of interconnection. Both formally and semantically, it encourages readers to think in terms of a vast net of interconnection in which birds and other wild creatures cannot be associated with escape from human strife or human limitation, for those now shape all planetary experience in the Anthropocene. Where nature poetry has tended, as Juliana Spahr notes, “to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat,” Reilly’s poetry—and that of the other writers treated here, including Spahr herself—acknowledges the beauty of nature within an exploration of unfolding ecological catastrophe. And while, as Spahr goes on to observe, nature poetry “wasn’t talking about how the bird, often a bird which had arrived recently from somewhere else, interacted with and changed the larger system of this small part of the world we live in and on,” Reilly and the other focal poets in this study examine interrelation, interaction, and environmental change.33 Birds in Reilly’s poem dramatize the current impact of humans on other species, an impact that involves careless destruction of individual creatures as well as the extinction or threatened extinction of entire species. In addition, birds in the poem are among a number of entities associated with flight—from angels and levitating saints to space trash—all of which are associated in the poem with the environmentally problematic human longing for transcendence.
The verbal text of “Wing/Span/Screw/Cluster (Aves),” too long to present in full here, is preceded by two black-and-white images that serve as visual epigraphs announcing major themes. The first displays a partially mangled bird carcass on a dirt surface, captioned “One of about 51,900 Google image search results for ‘roadkill+bird.’ ”34 The second also comes from the Internet and is a cropped photo of Giovanni Bernini’s seventeenth-century marble sculpture the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. The former provides an image of humans’ destructive impact on other species, and the latter, as I’ll show, offers an explanation for that destruction.
The opening point made by the verbal text is that killing birds is now a commonplace activity for industrialized humans:
much the usual mangle
at www.roadkill.com
flaps down/quiet
here.incold35
Spatially isolated below this appears a biblical-sounding imperative, “ ‘lo,’ ” which might also be letters from the elided “blood” we can’t help but hear after “incold”; this call to attention introduces a section of text concerned with Bernini’s sensuous sculpture. As a figure “in thrall” to the ecstasy of spiritual transport, one whose desire is directed upward toward the golden rays that pour from heaven, Saint Teresa represents the longing for transcendence of one’s earthly condition—a focus that distracts human attention and care from this world on which the survival of human and nonhuman animals depends. What Reilly elsewhere calls “the mesmerizing spell of the transcendent,”36 she regards as an important determinant of humankind’s damaging impact on real birds; it is key to “the actual.entangle / man (sic) to aves (sick).” The juxtapositional structure of the poem presents that upward-reaching impulse as expressed also in humans’ exploration of outer space, which has yielded “a poly.fix.styx.fury.flurry.slurry / of extra-terrain garbage //Some 15,000 pieces ranging from fingernail-sized paint flecks / to 10-ton rocket stages hurtling through the Earth’s orbit” (S 28–29). Ironically, human fascination with the space “above” us has resulted in the production of space debris that proves dangerous to our own space missions. What the poem presents as truly miraculous is not something out of this world, like the angel descended from heaven in Bernini’s sculpture, but creatures threatened within it: hummingbirds with their astonishingly rapid heartbeats and wing rotation rates as well as their incandescent plumage. However, many hummingbird species are extinct or nearing extinction, mostly due to anthropogenic habitat loss, and some of these are listed in italics in the poem:
Yet still.humming in fastest ::: 1200/min (heartbeat) 50/sec (wingbeat)
skirts hemmed
intonalwitness.artistry
Heliangelus regalis
Eriocnemis mirabilis
ofthe entrance
entrance
[please install dimmer] (S 29)
I understand the bracketed words as a plea, perhaps directed especially toward writers and other artists, to dim the glowing rays from the heavens that so enrapture us and in Reilly’s view (as in Cronon’s) maladjust our eyes to a quotidian earthly focus. Subsequent lines, in concert with a visual triptych showing the similarities of bone structure among “protoavian dinosaur,” “bird,” and “middle-aged human with / osteoporotic disintegration,” suggest that humans could easily share the fate of the dinosaurs or of the endangered hummingbirds, particularly if we don’t pay more attention to “the real real world” in all its gritty impurity. The outward and upward focus of “ekstasis: exteriosis” is linked in the poem to species extermination; “Wing/Span/Screw/Cluster (Aves)” closes by naming three additional endangered or possibly extinct species of hummingbirds, the earth’s jewels we humans have failed to value truly and have carelessly destroyed:
Calzadito Turquesa
Colibrí de Esmeraldas
Metalura Iracunda
(smallest death ladders
(cheapest cosmos jewelry
XXX (S 30–31)
As much as Berry or Oliver, Reilly appreciates the beauty of birds (the hummingbirds’ iridescent “skirts hemmed / intonalwitness.artistry”) and the pleasure of their “lovely.metallic.names,” but, feeling the weight of the self-conscious Anthropocene, she refuses to depict nonhuman animals apart from human impact—impact not only on the birds themselves but on the larger planetary environment, including distant levels of the atmosphere where our trash floats. In contrast to the poems by the older poets, Berry a
nd Oliver, “nature” here doesn’t offer escape or solace; nor does it exemplify lofty perfection. Instead, entities in nature reveal intertwined networks of anthropogenic change.
In this poem, meaning emerges not from the unspooling of logically sequential sentences or the repetition of images, but from proliferating links generated through parataxis. Page space becomes a plastic medium within which to arrange pieces of information and perception, and, as is generally true in collage art, juxtaposition invites attention to connection. We are invited to contemplate the relation between apparently contrasting human activities directed upward, or between the X’s that sound in ecstasy, extra (meaning beyond or outside, as in “extra-terrain garbage”), extinction and extermination. Reilly’s digitally inflected punctuation—the dots replacing spaces between words, as in domain names—evokes the nonlinear modes of information organization and transmission we depend on in this era of globalized commerce and consumption. Reilly has usefully commented on her sense of what will be required formally to generate an ecopoetics in which poets “participate in realizing the full implications of our position as language-using animals in a world composed of interconnection.” She does not advocate writing that extends the techniques of conventional nature lyric, “that simply expands the arena of natural description to include landfills and polluted streams, or that devises yet more astute metaphors based on carbon cycles and energy flows.” She continues, “While these tactics might have their uses, I think that ecopoetics must be a matter of finding formal strategies that effect a larger paradigm shift and that actually participate in the task of abolishing the aesthetic use of nature as mirror for human narcissism.”37
It will not surprise a reader who has seen the arrangements of Styrofoam’s space-filled pages that Reilly finds useful precedent in the formal strategies of Charles Olson. Again summoning the informational and structural resources of the Internet, she describes the contribution to ecopoetics of his open field poetics as “the opening of the page both topo- and typographically as a surface for juxtapositions, transforming it into a kind of MapQuest program, capable of being manipulated to investigate adjacencies in any direction, and in which any apparently peripheral element can be moved to a central position. In addition, his use of open parentheses made it possible to turn a poem into a theoretically endless branching diagram, in which any word or phrase can become the jumping-off point for an entirely new set of diagrammed relationships.”38 Reilly’s description of Olson’s projectivist page, from an essay published in 2010, sounds much like Morton’s description of “the mesh” in The Ecological Thought, published the same year. The mesh is Morton’s term for “the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things.” It designates a form of connectedness in which there can be no definite background or foreground: “Each point of the mesh is both the center and edge of a system of points, so there is no absolute center or edge.” Ecological instability reigns in the mesh, where everything is interdependent, connected, potentially significant to everything else—hence the “disorienting openness” Morton attributes to “the ecological thought.”39 Reilly’s and Morton’s shared emphasis on endlessly branching connections even among apparently disparate things, and on open, relational forms in which no element is inherently or lastingly central, points to dimensions of environmental thinking emerging in the self-conscious Anthropocene that differ meaningfully from the perspectives inherited from the early era of industrialization.
Not all the poets on whom I will focus are exploring branching forms or collage as a kind of (inter)netted fabric. However, recognizing the scale and complexity of the environmental problems we humans face and the responsibilities we in the industrialized world must assume, they all embrace the challenge of trying to imagine the state of the world as it really is. They aspire not to represent beautiful scenes of nature without humans, but instead to sustain what Joan Retallack calls “a complex realism.”40 Through their poetry they seek to better understand the nature and scope of the changes humans have wrought in the Anthropocene, and the impact of those changes on human and nonhuman bodies and lives; they are interested in exploring how current environmental problems are rooted in received ways of thinking and speaking, in our ways of relating to human and nonhuman others, as well as in our social, political, and material cultures. Using a range of formal strategies, they try to imagine how already evident anthropogenic environmental changes will continue to affect the planet through geological as well as human time, how the vast human population might live on earth sustainably and justly into the future, and what will happen if we fail to do so.
None of these writers imagines that poetry will save the world. But their writing suggests a belief that poets have significant responsibilities and a meaningful role to play in both considering and determining “what kind of world we will shape.”41 Jorie Graham, whose Sea Change is discussed in chapter 3, says this about the current functions of the artistic imagination in a 2010 interview titled “Instructions for Building the Arc”:
Scientists can provide all the information in the world, but if the human soul of the listeners only seizes it as “information” it does not necessarily awaken them to a genuine physical belief that the outcomes being described are in a world co-extensive with this very one in which they are living, with this very time in which their children are growing. It is easy to “capture” information and then shove it to one side of one’s life. The conceptual intellect is great at that. It is in a way the primary job of the imagination to connect the world in which you are, to one in which you have not yet been, or cannot imagine being. And if that connection occurs, it allows one to hope one can be roused to action, or at least to the change of world view which we need in order to envision, and undertake, genuine action.42
In a more recent interview Graham explains the artist’s role slightly differently, suggesting that scientists are actively seeking the help of artists so that the broader public may better grasp scientific perspectives, think in expanded temporalities, and respond appropriately to the probably unwelcome implications of new information:
What is being sought by scientists, in artists’ practical use of the Imagination, is how to make the ‘deep future’—seven to ten generations hence—feel actually ‘connected’ to us, right down to this very minute of our lives, this choice we make to use this Styrofoam cup, this plastic bag. . . . How can you expect a person to find, let alone feel, and act upon, the fine thread that truly connects their very next choice to a life 1,000 years hence which might not in any way resemble what we know of as human life? How do we make sacrifices—ones that will affect our entire way of life in our only life—for those who we do not even know will exist, that they might have a planet still livable, a biome still conducive to human habitation. This is a very hard task indeed. One cannot imagine many requests that have ever been made of the human Imagination that exceed it.43
Far from regarding their poems as “imaginary parks in which we may breathe an air that is not toxic,”44 the writers on whose work I focus use the resources of the imagination to help readers recognize in the air they are breathing toxins that might otherwise go unregistered, even while doing somatic damage; or, they may remind readers that in the lands set aside as parks, once home to now exiled indigenous peoples, the lives of the myriad interdependent species currently at home there are rendered precarious by the cascading effects of changing climate. These poets’ work, then, does not fill the role the Romantic poet John Keats assigned to poetry, “To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.”
Importantly, however, this work of the self-conscious Anthropocene aspires to more than grim consciousness-raising, though that may be among its goals. The poets treated in this study try to contribute to the development of new ways of thinking, of new paradigms alternative to those that brought us to current crises and stalemates, and for most of them formal or linguistic experimentalism is a key resource in this quest. On this topic Joan Retallack’s essay “What Is
Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?” is particularly pertinent. After quoting Wittgenstein when he explains that the lack of progress in philosophy is “because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions,” she notes, “What we long for is implanted in our grammatical structures as much as it is in our vocabularies.” Change in either one—our desires or our linguistic structures—could prompt change in the other. Every formal experiment, in Retallack’s view, is “a move away from the present state of things” that may “enact interrogations into [the contemporary moment’s] most problematic structures.” When approached as an instrument of genuinely “investigative engagement,” language “takes part in the recomposing of contemporary consciousness, contemporary sensibilities.” Consequently, Retallack endorses “the poet as radical epistemologist” who investigates, interrogates, and transforms the ways of knowing that take form in written language, who enacts a belief that “it matters to find new ways of being among one and others in the world via poetic forms.” Having endorsed John Dewey’s vision of art’s “use being a new training of modes of perception,” she calls attention to “a radical reconception of ‘nature poetry’ [that] is currently taking place, so radical that, like Stein’s invention of new modes of description, it’s hardly recognizable as the genre.”45 That radical reconception is the subject of this study.
THE CHAPTERS AHEAD
Each subsequent chapter focuses on an issue or conceptual challenge crucial to the self-conscious Anthropocene as it is addressed by two or three poets. Chapter 1 attends to scale and its perception—that is, to the challenges of grasping the overwhelming size and complexity as well as the rapidity of Anthropocene planetary change—an issue that shadows all the chapters to follow. It examines poetic responses to the collision of discrepant scales of time and space encountered when one tries to think the Anthropocene and the place of humankind or the human individual within it. For while the few hundred years since the Industrial Revolution constitute a minuscule unit in geological time, the transformations wrought by our single species in those few years will affect the planet for an unfathomably deep future. The three poets whose work is discussed pursue different strategies in response to what I term “scalar dissonance.” In “Unnamed Dragonfly Species,” from Well Then There Now (2011), a text that interweaves a narrative about people who obsessively track glacial melting on the Internet with species names from a New York state list of endangered or extinct species, Juliana Spahr exposes the psychological and affective dynamics of a dissonance that she treats as insuperable. In “The Carboniferous and Ecopoetics,” from Redstart (2012), Forrest Gander focuses not on affective but on perceptual challenges. Gander attempts to make geological time imaginable through highly sensuous renderings of earlier epochs, thereby bringing home the disproportion of human consumption within three hundred years of virtually all the carbon that accumulated underground over more than 300 million years. Ed Roberson, who, like Gander, has scientific as well as arts training, presents scalar shifting as part of the human perceptual toolkit, evident in our accommodation to the perspective gained from airplanes or spacecraft, and also in our ability to tune into minute natural phenomena in our immediate surroundings. That we will use this tool to our advantage before it’s too late remains, in his work, unlikely, but his lines that constantly shift direction to explore divergent aspects of the phenomenological world suggest the value of behaving so that one may, as his volume’s title has it, “see the earth before the end of the world.”