Recomposing Ecopoetics

by Lynn Keller

  Below, in the umbratile interval between one step and another, a tetrapod resembling a large newt freezes and blinks into the sound of the world, the chirp and whirr of insects and the high frequency mutter of its own species. Fronds brush fronds in a light breeze. (And what, eons later, does the Kreutzer Sonata, which Tolstoy will deem dangerous for its capacity to arouse erotic feelings, what does that music have over this sound?) The animal blinks again, its hydraulic limbs holding it above smudged tracks that mark where others of its kind mated, their mouths popping, cheek muscles bulging. Five tumescent digits on each foot channel ground vibrations into neural impulses. It takes stock and goes on. (“I am still alive then. That may come in useful,” Beckett’s Molloy quips.) (RS 6)

  References tying the scene to modern works of art interrupt the illusion of presence, but only to diminish illusions of human specialness. They do not diminish the reader’s vivid immersion in this evolutionary drama as he or she witnesses as, for instance, “Ferns luxuriate across wetlands: dragonfly seed ferns, rhizomatic ferns, ferns spoked like the dorsal fin of a swordfish, each loosing into the air millions of spores coated with oil and chlorophyll” (RS 6–7). As if present, readers follow the transformations of organic materials during a radically distant time in which layers of plant life are laid down so thickly and so rapidly that “they don’t have time to decay” and instead are pressed into coal, our legacy from the Carboniferous. That period, the time covered by Gander’s astonishing creation story, lasted from approximately 395 to 299 million years ago. By the point in the text where Gander identifies coal as a form of sunlight, readers are prepared to accept that startling vision as nonmetaphoric: “When we pick up a piece of coal, it is the fossil residue of photosynthesis, a condensation of Paleozoic sunlight that we hold in our hands” (RS 7). By exerting imaginative pressure to extend ordinary sense perceptions so that near-mythic marvel and factual particularity merge in depictions of the phenomenal world, Gander generates understanding of otherwise mind-boggling geological processes and time scales.

  With the arrival of the human, Gander’s narrative accelerates and he begins to introduce statistics, but still as part of a story, which readers now understand to have been all along the story of coal. He moves through the Industrial Revolution and up to the Great Acceleration:

  and then, about three decades ago, mountaintop removal mining. In West Virginia alone, more than 350,000 acres of forested mountains are lopped off, and 1,200 miles of streams are buried. The overburden or leftover rock fills adjacent valleys. One of the by-products of excavation is slurry, a pool of chemical waste and toxic metals. Postexcavation by-products like ash and poisonous gases are released in the next phase: the burning of coal in power plants. (RS 8)

  The narrative ends as Gander shifts from the current unprecedented consumption of coal to its imminent exhaustion:

  In China, where more than 6,000 men died in mines in 2004, where coal seams in the north hiss in unstoppable fires started by small-scale mining operators, and where the deserts are yawning wider at an alarming rate, coal is powering unprecedented industrialization. Some scientists estimate that coal will provide half the world’s energy by the year 2100. And a hundred years after that, all the exploitable reserves of coal in the earth will be exhausted. (RS 9)

  What took nearly a hundred million years to create more than three hundred million years ago will have been consumed by one species in less than three hundred years; “the relation between those two sets of numbers,” Gander notes, “represents six orders of magnitude.” A reader who has taken the journey of this story of coal from its enchanting beginnings to its sudden end can’t avoid registering the significance of this shocking scalar disproportion. While rapid consumption of fossil fuels by the developed world has had benefits as well as costs, its recklessness could hardly be more clear.

  Yet the section is not quite over. Or perhaps what appears after the dividing line following the passage just quoted should be thought of as the “and” linking “The Carboniferous” with “Ecopoetics” in the work’s title. On a new page, with a horizontal line at the top, the final passage before section II reads: “A poem, even excavated from its context and the time of its writing, is a curiously renewable form of energy. It’s hard to be sure whether it is from the future or the past that the poet Henry Vaughan writes, ‘They are all gone into the world of light! / And I alone sit ling’ring here’ ” (RS 10). At this point, as past and future blur—and again the transtemporal quality of artistic insight emerges—questions of scale fade into the background. Rather than dwelling further on the horror of coal’s planet-poisoning consumption, or on the straits in which that leaves us, Gander turns to considering the powers of art, inviting readers to light their lives with the energy to be discovered in poems. What I find startling here is the use of metaphor. The preceding pages of “The Carboniferous” contain a number of similes (e.g., “Beneath hundreds of thousands of meters of overlying rot, the peat beds contract like a frog’s iris into thin horizontal lines”) and an occasional metaphor (e.g., “At full throttle, technologies advance”) that help the reader envision the planetary changes depicted. Here, however, there’s a striking disjunction between the very literal problems of the combustion of nonrenewable, polluting coal that Gander has been emphasizing and the claim that poems are a form of “renewable energy.” For however much poems may speak with renewed relevance to different eras, and however much they may warm our hearts or illuminate our minds, poems cannot warm our homes or power our industries unless through the burning of the paper they are printed on. They cannot in any direct way solve our energy problems or slow climate change.

  I suspect Gander intends this abrupt shift to highlight a problem pervasive in ecopoetics: the disjunction between the perhaps quixotic hope many poets, including himself, place in poetry, on the one hand, and the limited agency of any writing that relies on shifts in consciousness and awareness to generate social or political change, on the other. Part II, “Ecopoetics,” written in a more scholarly mode, wrestles with the claims made for ecopoetics and what should be expected from it, still pondering whether, as Auden announced, “poetry makes nothing happen” (RS 14). Although much of this section takes the form of questions, cautions, and qualifications, Gander ultimately gives weight to several recent anthropological studies as “register[ing] support for the argument that language, perception, and conception are irrevocably connected” (RS 15), with changed conception opening the way for changed behavior. (This echoes Joan Retallack’s argument mentioned in the introduction, and it is a literary version of the hope of historians Worster and Chakrabarty.) Yet he carefully qualifies his claims:

  If language does affect the way we think about being in the world, poetry can make something happen. I would suggest that it does. Certainly, I feel it has profoundly influenced the way I experience the world. But it probably doesn’t affect perception nearly as directly as poets might wish. Getting rid of the capital I, eliminating pronouns altogether, deconstructing normative syntax, making the word “wordy”—these techniques, all more than a century old, impact the reader. But the effects are complex and subtle and may not correspond to a writer’s intentions at all. (RS 16–17)

  Gander goes on to offer the possibility that “poems might be seen to take responsibility for certain ways of thinking and writing, as Charles Altieri notes, ‘precisely by inviting audiences to see what powers they take on as they adapt themselves to how the texts ask to be read’ ” (RS 17). Part I of “The Carboniferous and Ecopoetics” constitutes such an invitation. It employs several of the techniques he lists, such as eliminating the “I” and stressing the materiality of language—which, he notes, “look a lot like innovative poetic strategies championed for the last hundred years” (RS 11)—to provide his audience with powers of vision less focused on the human subject and human scale. By enabling readers to imagine unaccustomed realms and time scales in richly sensuous ways, “The Carboniferous” conveys a somatically based
understanding of anthropogenic environmental damage and of the planetary limits humans are up against. Yet in “Ecopoetics” the question of whether taking on those perceptual powers will translate into “ways of being in the world that might lead to less exploitative and destructive histories” remains (RS 15). In putting the two parts, with the unsettling “and,” together into one work, Gander demonstrates his own impassioned investment in and hopes for the powers of language and their connection to perception or apprehension. At the same time, he exposes his uncertainties and discomforts around claims that have been made by avant-gardes throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first-century—claims he himself longs to make—that link linguistic experimentation to social or political transformation.

  MULTISCALAR PERCEPTION IN ED ROBERSON’S TO SEE THE EARTH BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD

  If Gander in “The Carboniferous” works to cultivate in his readers a sensorily perceptive imagination that will enable them to grasp unfamiliar Anthropocene scales, Roberson highlights the perceptual range and flexibility that our minds and senses already have. His writing in To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2010) conveys an awareness that humans have adapted before to shifting perspectival scales, for instance in the aerial views made available by plane flight and more recently by photos from space exploration.25 His poems suggest that humans move through the world perceiving in a kind of constantly shifting scalar kaleidoscope. Roberson—who has studied both painting and limnology and whose writing over four decades has demonstrated an intensive interest in perspective and perception—implies that apprehending Anthropocene scales is only an extension of an adjustment that, however astonishing, has long been part of the human tool kit. Despite this hopeful vision of human perceptual flexibility, however, his title poem seems to reject any hope that this ability, or the poet’s calling attention to it, will prove helpful in averting environmental disaster. At the same time, he sounds less anxious than Spahr or Gander, as his work enacts and advocates an attention to one’s immediate sensory environment that refuses absorption in abstract guilt, fear, or concerns about language’s limited power.

  Roberson ponders the adaptability of human scalar perception in “Topoi,” whose speaker describes the geography observed from a plane descending into Newark and then wonders,

  at

  what point did we become so familiar with

  such long perspective we could look down

  and recognize the pile of Denver by the drop off

  and crumble of the plate up into the Rockies,

  or say That’s Detroit! by the link of lakes by

  Lake St. Clair some thirty-thousand feet

  above Lake Erie while just barely spotting Huron

  on the horizon? (TSEB 11)

  Roberson’s speaker goes on to note that people in earlier civilizations who survived by hunting had similar maps in their heads, though limited to terrain traversed on foot. He notes, too, that we have lost the hunter’s vision and that we are now in a situation of extreme precarity, figured with a cartoonlike image of humankind as a dancing bear suddenly realizing the ball on which it dances is hanging over the abyss: “Like trained bear / dancing on a circus ball, we look down, our feet in a step / from which there is no step off” (TSEB 11). The scale has shifted; the earth itself is tiny. Yet it’s also the size of all life throughout evolutionary time; in Roberson’s play with the notion of footprint as “the surface over which / a phenomenon exists,” the earth becomes “this footprint of all step ever taken,” “the footprint of life.” At once large and small, it’s all we’ve got, “the ball that all our ways are woven from.”

  Repeatedly in the volume, Roberson places human experience within a context of astronomical space and deep time that challenges anthropocentrism in its dwarfing of the human. “The oceans of the time men don’t exist,” he notes, “include only a drop that we do / and see / above them another ocean’s spray of stars”—rendering the human an infinitesimal part of a gorgeous pattern (TSEB 21). He incorporates mention that the sun’s light travels for 93 million miles or that stars whose light we see may have burnt out long ago. But rather than making such perspectives daunting, he suggests, sometimes subtly, the many shifting scales we regularly accommodate. “Deep Time,” for instance, begins with the familiar tree canopy assuming the scale of the entire sky with leaves as its clouds and its Milky Way; from that tree world, Roberson renders the return of the seventeen-year cicadas (itself an oddly scaled life cycle from a human perspective) as the generation of distant stars. The arrival of the cicada’s music merges with the arrival of starlight delayed by its travel through space. Through metaphor, scales of time and space shift repeatedly, and sound partially substitutes for visible light (“heard but unseen / insect star births”), though sunlight coming through the trees also is scaled up as “explosions of nova”:

  Where trees are a sky

  whose spider web

  radio antennas’

  search receives

  the rhythmic static

  of cicadas,

  a song arrives

  that died leaving

  seventeen years ago.

  Deep

  cumulus leaves—

  whose cloud and Milky Way

  are green,

  and heard but unseen

  insect star births

  have yet to reach us from—

  refract the sun

  -light filtered

  through to brilliant spike

  explosions of nova (TSEB 7)

  The poem concludes by noting “that one / day our own / insect sun” will explode, hissing “in deep time into deepsong” (TSEB 7). That vision of our puny sun disappearing into deep time is no more of a scalar wonder than the tree skies and cicadas’ radio transmissions with which the poem opens. Weaving through the twists of what Roberson calls his “polyphonic syntax” as well as the scalar and perceptual shifts of his descriptions may be dizzying (are these literal spiderwebs, or have the outermost twigs of the trees assumed the delicate proportion of spiderwebs, which in turn act as antennas receiving the cicadas’ song?).26 But such writing invites readers to embrace the challenge of planetary scalar transformation as a manageable operation—one particularly familiar to poets and poetry readers via the action of metaphor. Readers of poetry are accustomed to phrases like “insect sun,” and Roberson’s writing implies that such imaginative practice prepares people to see humankind in varying scales—here, in its geological insignificance.

  As in “Topoi,” where the modern speaker possessed an internal map analogous to the mental map of a primitive hunter, Roberson often presents continuities between past, present, and possible future adaptations in ways that make clear what is, on a human scale, calamitously at stake now, while also suggesting that shifts that might counteract current risks are within our grasp because grounded in earlier human patterns. While acknowledging losses, he also suggests the possibility of nondeclensionist environmental narratives.

  Even though its title “Old Dependency” emphasizes a continuity in human experience, and although the poem involves a profound loss, it embraces compensating gains in technology—here, the satellite-dependent technology of the digital watch. The title alludes to the lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”: “We live in an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night.”27 Roberson’s poem compares the timekeeping of a watch adjusted by satellite signal with the human body’s now diminished sense of time. His body has forgotten “how the sunrise set / men’s cycles,” an adjustment once made through a close “melanin-melatonin connection.” Consequently, he needs a piece of “inorganic / jewelry // connecting a crystal oscillation through / a radio wave in orbit” as a cyborgian prosthesis, an intravenous feed supplying time and rhythm to his being. Toward the poem’s end, the speaker offers a kind of prayer for a realignment through that “gemstone cut music on [his] arm” that would reconnect him not only with the rhythm of natural cycles but with an int
ense sensitivity to ecosystemic relationality:

  let this renew an old interpretation

  how we could talk

  to rock, listen to plants explain

  in the stomach what membranous

  exchange

  is the dawn star with ear of corn; (TSEB 17)

  But rather than closing with this atavistic longing alone (an example of what Noah Heringman critiques as evolutionary nostalgia),28 he turns toward his present reality, which is characterized by a compromised responsiveness to biological cycles and by the body’s imbrication with the machine. All along he has presented the watch in anthropomorphizing metaphors that blur the boundary between machine and human and align their disparate scales. “My watch sits meditating, on the sill, / faces out the window at tonight’s / radio sky,” he writes, before presenting the watch’s clasp as its “knees . . . folded underneath” in a posture of prayer, the watch “a timing sun’s worshipper” (the signal-sending satellite was introduced as “Sun-like”). At the same time, he describes the human body as having a (watchlike) “band to the watched face of the sun,” through the “melanin-melatonin connection” operating via the skin. Modern humanity no longer responds sensitively to that mechanism that “tells the wake and sleep”; it is no longer functioning in the ways it evolved to function. Accepting humans’ new dependency on the watch and the sunlike satellite as contiguous with the old dependency on the sun, the speaker continues on from the prayer-like passage quoted above to close the poem as follows: “the watch, its passage, and waking flesh / working to live in time” (TSEB 17). Planetary cycles, biological processes, and human technology—however different their scales—are seen as functioning in harmony.