by Lynn Keller
& yet, listen,
there was
rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness
of brimming, & the
wet rainbowing where oil from exhaust picks up light, sheds glow, then
echoes in the drains where
deep inside the
drops fall individually, plink
& the places where birds
interject, & the coming-on of heat, & the girl looking sideways carrying the
large
bouquet of blue hydrangeas, shaking the
water off, &
the wondering if this is it, or are we in for another round, a glance up, a quick
step
over the puddle
carrying speedy clouds,
birdcall now confident again, heat drying, suddenly no evidence of its having
been wet—but no, you
didn’t even notice it—it rained.
(SC 26)
The particularization of this appreciative catalog encourages readers to use their own ears and eyes, to take notice.
The pleasures of sensory experience on which Graham focuses generally fall within the realm of the literary pastoral. I say that despite details like “rainbowing” on “oil from exhaust” not just because such references to beauty that stress an industrialized context are rare in these poems, but more importantly because the perhaps suburban world in which Graham’s speakers take pleasure functions as the “green world” of the pastoral mode traditionally has: as a precious oasis that offers an escape from a diminished or corrupted world and that is the focus of nostalgic longing. That last assertion may seem curious in that the speaker inhabits the described world—and it’s one whose environmental health is evidently diminished. But because Graham keeps in her readers’ view the backward-looking perspective from a drastically degraded future in which our current world will look paradisal, her speaker’s present time becomes also an already nostalgically viewed past. And while the current environment Graham describes is not necessarily rural, its nesting ring-necked doves, falcons, fields in which “new shoots glow” (SC 37), creeks with minnows, and blossoming trees—even if those trees are blossoming at the wrong times and the doves are buffeted by high winds—make it seem a bucolic locus amoenus in comparison to the harvestless desert lacking in songbirds and other familiar animals that constitutes the environment of her prophesied future.
Invoking a pastoral realm as a foil to the horrors of apocalypse is a common move in apocalyptic writing.32 Lawrence Buell has observed, “the pastoral logic that undergirds environmental apocalypse . . . rests on the appeal to the moral superiority of an antecedent state of existence when humankind was not at war with nature in the way that prevails now.” In Sea Change, that antecedent state seems precariously preserved in the backyard pastoralism of the speaker’s domestic life, a real-world version of Rachel Carson’s pastoral: “The mythical American small community, the desecration of whose integral leafy exurban bliss is portrayed in her introductory ‘Fable for Tomorrow.’ ” Apocalyptic texts like Carson’s—and, I would add, Graham’s—that invoke the pastoral are, Buell notes, examples of the “doubleness of American pastoral ideology”: “activist appeals to nostalgia, accomplishing their interventions by invocations of actual green worlds about to be lost.” He adds that one shouldn’t assume the authors “believe that their portrayals of these about-to-be-lost worlds say all there is to be a said about them” but rather that they intend “to create moral antitheses that would force readers to confront the possibility that history has reached a turning point” for the environment.33 Even so, the pastoral tends to produce wariness in current ecocritics, including Heise and sometimes Buell himself, because of its association with a dichotomous vision of nature in opposition to culture as well as with outdated understandings of ecology, and also because it can serve as a retreat and a turn away from environmental problems.
Examining two apocalyptic poems from Sea Change, I will demonstrate how Graham, in whose writing the pastoral impulse is strong and tied to her tendency toward aestheticization, navigates the risks it poses—in one poem, by offering a reflexive critique of her own pastoral impulse and in another poem more typical of the collection, by making the pastoral clearly only a temporary refuge. The speaker in “Futures” explores from a critical perspective how attention to the visible world can become a form of ownership. (The title evokes the futures market as well as temporal futures.) Through the language of capitalism, Graham critiques what the poem calls the poet’s “action of beauty,” an aestheticization connected to pastoral’s simplifying vision of a green world. The poem begins, “Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind. Own what, own / whom. I look up. Own the looking at us / say the cuttlefish branchings [of bare deciduous trees], lichen-black, moist.” The sense of personal ownership associated with seeing is presented as essential to the act; it cannot be “scoured from inside the / glance.” What prevents this “thrilling” “push of owning” the natural scene from bringing happiness to the observer is awareness of ongoing (present and future) environmental destruction, only some of which is or will be visible: “the crop destroyed, / water everywhere not / drinkable, & radioactive waste in it, & human bodily / waste” (SC 14). In the poem’s closing passages, Graham presents a vignette, introduced with the past tense but ambiguously set in the future, in which the speaker finds herself turning a painfully degraded pastoral scene into one in which she can feel pleasure in ownership. This emotional shift from pain to the pleasure registered in her smile takes place through an act of enumeration that is also an aestheticization:
one day a swan appeared out of nowhere on the drying river,
it
was sick, but it floated, and the eye felt the pain of rising to take it in—I own you
said the old feeling, I want
to begin counting
again, I will count what is mine, it is moving quickly now, I will begin this
message “I”—I feel the
smile, put my hand up to be sure, yes on my lips—the yes—I touch it again, I
begin counting, I say one to the swan, one,
do not be angry with me o my god, I have begun the action of beauty again, on
the burning river I have started the catalogue,
your world, (SC 15–16)
The burning river is an apocalyptic image, recalling the many destructive fires in Revelation, including 8:10–11, in which a burning star called Wormwood “fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters” rendering the waters poisonous and causing the deaths of many men.34 To begin the action of beauty in analogous circumstances seems gruesomely inappropriate. The speaker’s apostrophe to her god conveys her sense of transgression in this act of beautification and enumeration. The lines immediately following further taint that action by linking it to the attraction of money—which, ironically, smells like the natural realm of pastoral beauty that the poem makes clear exists only in the imagination, not in the external environment. It can be imagined and remembered, but, with “water everywhere not / drinkable,” its physical sustenance is no longer available in unpolluted form:
I your speck tremble remembering money, its dry touch, sweet strange
smell, it’s a long time, the smell of it like lily
of the valley
sometimes, and pondwater, and how
one could bend down close to it
and drink. (SC 16)
“Futures” conveys Graham’s unease with her own tendency to aestheticize her surroundings. The artist risks becoming more taken up with the potentially endless imaginative act of beautifully naming entities in (or once in) nature than with acts of stewardship or attempts at ecopolitical change. And the same goes for the reader. Lawrence Buell astutely observes that “in pastoral, beauty never functions only as critique. At some level there is always the chance that the text will tempt the reader to see all sugar and no pill and that even hard
thrusts will get deflected into quaint excursions.”35 If this is a risk in Graham’s Sea Change, “Futures” might be read as a combination of confession and warning to readers to resist such deflection.
“Positive Feedback Loop” exposes the escapist potential in the pastoral that some ecocritics have noted. (“Positive feedback loop” is a phrase often used in connection with global climate change, since many consequences of the earth’s warming themselves amplify it.) The speaker at the poem’s opening is intensely conscious of a present impinged upon by the future, what Graham calls the “silence that precedes.” This is a suspension more ominously weighted than, say, the summer morning experienced as ongoing arrival in “Later in Life.” What this silence both holds and heralds is catastrophic environmental transformation:
complete collapse, in the North Atlantic
Drift, in the
thermohaline circulation, this
will happen,
fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef, the new Age of
Extinctions is
now (SC 42)
As the speaker’s consciousness moves in and out of meditation on imminent danger, the poem looks also to the past, noting that for ages cultures have feared and tried to ward off disaster, usually through religious ritual. At the close the speaker ends her divagating meditation by relocating herself first “in the Great Dying again”—that is, dwelling in the crisis of extinctions—but then almost immediately thereafter in the anticipation of “a / lovely evening” when, after “a bit of food a bit of drink” we
shall walk
out onto the porch and the evening shall come on around us, unconcealed,
blinking, abundant, as if catching sight of us,
everything in and out under the eaves, even the grass seeming to push up into
this our
world as if out of
homesickness for it,
gleaming. (SC 44)
This moment, the poem’s ending, is one of pastoral pleasure; “we” inhabit a simpler green world, a realm of abundance where swallows or bats fly near the eaves, the stars become visible, the grass gleams. Readers may find disturbing the incongruity of such a moment in juxtaposition to The Great Dying, particularly since the experience reflects social privilege of a kind that has been seen as dulling awareness of environmental injustice. If this turn to the pastoral is redeemed, it is so through its implicitly acknowledged brevity. This lovely moment is tied to the coming on of evanescent evening, sure to be followed by night’s darkness. The imagined homesickness of the grass projects the speaker’s own longing for a world she precariously inhabits and treasures but also feels she is both losing and has already lost.
While some of Graham’s catalogs record the anthropogenic ills of the ecosystems in which we are embedded, she is repeatedly drawn back to naming what is wondrous in what is still, precariously, the “normal.” This iterative reminder that we are not yet at the end of the world, so that it remains possible to sustain momentary appreciation of our blessings, seems to me Graham’s way of making both living in crisis and her own apocalyptic perspective bearable. This interpretation fits with conventional understandings of the restorative function of pastoral as a temporary reprieve; Leo Marx calls attention to this brevity when describing the idyllic episodes characteristic of American pastoral, clearly relevant to Sea Change, in which “the protagonist enjoys a sense of ecstatic fulfillment, a feeling of calm selfhood and integration with his or her surroundings.” Such moments “are linked to the old pastoral by a setting that often resembles the locus amoenus or pleasance: the lovely, peaceful shaded natural site that has figured prominently in the Arcadian mode since Virgil’s first eclogue.” Marx goes on, “As might be expected, however, this experience of transcendence is fleeting; it proves, in [Robert] Frost’s fine phrase, to be only ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’ ”36 The blinking lights at the close of “Positive Feedback Loop” and the evanescence of evening itself signal the temporariness of this respite in Graham’s work and serve both to criticize and to limit the escapism associated with the pastoral.
However much she wishes to sustain the pleasure-filled moments of presence that feel suspended out of time, Graham’s speaker is always pulled back into history. As a momentary stay, however, the pastoral in all its beauty has great value in her work as a mode for registering the sensory pleasure produced in endangered and even damaged environments. The pastoral helps Graham hold out to readers the hope implicit in comic or avertive apocalypse, that all is not yet lost. Capturing nature’s beauties, the world’s sensory pleasures may bring into focus something worth fighting to preserve while implying a strong critique of all that threatens it.
The volume’s closing poem “Long Way Round,” which I discussed in connection with Graham’s compulsion to tell a future audience “what / normal was” (SC 56), records, as the opening poem does, a moment of seemingly unnatural weather—“High winds again”—when, with symbolic significance, evening is coming on. Two successive sentences in this poem aptly record the tension that animates Sea Change and much serious eco-apocalyptic writing of the self-conscious Anthropocene: “One has to believe / furthermore in the voyage of others. The dark / gathers” (SC 54). On the one hand, the writer remains invested in ongoing life, and in changing the present to make a future possible; this is the stance underlying comic apocalypse. At the same time, that future possibility seems to be disappearing. Unable to either resolve this tension or simply sustain it, in the book’s closing lines Graham moves toward the consolation of a deep ecological perspective: “there are sounds the planet will always make, even / if there is no one to hear them” (SC 56). The volume’s combination of dire scientific information about global warming and personal meditations on the beauty of life embedded in damaged ecosystems seems to enact the kind of wake-up call we expect of eco-apocalyptic writing. But the pressures of living in crisis make this particularly difficult to sustain. When Graham in closing looks with a kind of Zen acceptance to a world without humans or sentient life forms (an acceptance not unlike Roberson’s as he contemplates the vanishing figurative ice sculpture in the deep time context of “our small human extinction”), she nearly abandons much of what has made apocalyptic writing a motivator for change. Nearly, but not quite completely: she still says “if,” not “when.”
ANTI-PASTORAL HUMOR AND MULTISPECIES EMBEDDEDNESS IN EVELYN REILLY’S APOCALYPSO
Evelyn Reilly’s Apocalypso offers few if any pastoral pleasures. The immediate pleasures with which she lightens the gloom of apocalyptic awareness are, as we will see, less tainted by nostalgia, while her foregrounding of apocalyptic rhetoric as an ancient practice—one she mocks even as she seriously deploys it—makes her volume seem more removed from declensionist perspectives. Instead of representing beautiful nature, the poems of Apocalypso emphasize the dominance of technology in contemporary living—especially digital technology, which Reilly, with an ambivalence like Graham’s toward the pastoral, both enjoys and critiques—and the too often overlooked interdependence of human and nonhuman animals.37
Reilly’s eschewing of the pastoral is evident, for instance, in a passage from “Chilled Harold,” a poem that combines aspects of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage with the narrative methods of the children’s book, Harold and the Purple Crayon, in which the protagonist’s story emerges as he draws it.38 The passage begins “where a forest / was supposed to be,” a place that might have promised a green world, but where Harold instead finds “one remaining tree, / with fruit needing protection.” The poem continues:
So he drew some fierce protection
and got so caught up
in the violence of his depiction,
he scared even himself.
Shaking, he drew the ripples
of a sea by accident,
then quickly got in over his head.
Eventually, he climbed onto some sand,
where a sign said, “Reserved for American
He ate a huge amount of appalling pie
and then shared the rest with a moose39
The manner of this fast-moving narrative is jocular, enhanced by puns (apple/appall) and the literalization of banal figuration (“in over his head”), and although the pastoral landscape seems to have been destroyed there’s no evident nostalgia, only a sharp critique of America’s disproportionate consumption of the world’s so-called natural resources. When characterizing her sense of ecopoetics, Reilly explicitly rejects the pastoral as she seeks “a poetry that is not one of retreat and meditation, but of engagement and innovation—one that is not rural, regional, or pastoral, but is of a world in a continuum of crisis and ecological in scope, a community of communities.” She believes “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.”40 Presumably, the pastoral is one version of such narcissism, its rural haven having been constructed as a counterpoint to the corruptions of court, urban, or industrialized life. The Romantic traditions of nature description and first-person lyricism to which Graham retains ties also fit that perspective Reilly would like to see abolished.
Reilly’s approach to apocalyptic discourse in Apocalypso reflects her curiosity when composing the volume “as to whether our moment was uniquely marked by a kind of catastrophic end-time imagination or if this was just an amping up of something always in the human psyche—the fight-or-flight mechanism compulsively monitoring, on a micro-to-macro scale, the potential for various kinds of impending disaster.”41 She seems to have landed on the “amping up” side of things, which might align with Frederick Buell’s sense of dwelling in crisis. Her reliance in the volume’s title poem on the Book of Revelation as well as her references to works like Pieter Breugel the Elder’s Fall of the Rebel Angels underscore that apocalyptic thinking is nothing new. However, the dystopian poems, which set the stage for “Apocalypso: A Comedy,” emphasize that our current technologies promise a very different version of postapocalyptic conditions than any imaginable in previous eras.