Recomposing Ecopoetics
Page 22
The bark beetle poems demonstrate the poet’s desire to be informed about and imaginatively aware of the physical conditions in which these insects leave their records in tree bark. After the adult beetles have chewed through the bark, mated, and deposited eggs within it, for a period of about six to eight weeks each larva chews its own path through the bark, producing a tunnel that usually widens as the larva grows—doing so at the same time that other larvae are carving their own tunnels. Scientists speak of these tunnel complexes as galleries, and several species of bark beetle are named engraver beetles, so Gladding’s sense of these beings as artists has been anticipated by the language entomologists provided. Asked by an interviewer how bark beetle poems relate to the lives of the beetles, she replied: “My feeling is that they are love poems. Like many of our poems, they speak of longing. It takes many bark beetles, developing through many stages of their lives, to complete a bark beetle poem. Often they are working parallel to one another, making lines that never cross, though they can sense one another’s vibrations through the wood.”42 Her understanding draws on scientific knowledge of vibrational communication within and between species through the substrate of the host tree, to which she adds perception of an emotional dynamic. Because these engravings are a communal product resulting from the labor of multiple beetles and larvae, it makes sense that Gladding posits a pronoun form, indicated by •, that “is used for first and second person in singular, plural, and all cases.” She translates into conventional English grammar but leaves the • that invites us to hear “•’ ve” as “I/we/you have,” “m•” as “me/us/you.” “yo•” as “you/me/us.”
To demonstrate, here’s the first bark beetle poem in the collection, part 1 of “Spending Most of Their Time in Galleries, Adults Come into the Open on Warm Sunny Days: Translations from Bark Beetle”:
•’ve learned through wood
yo• can only travel in one direction
but turn again with m• there love
sap in the chamber
red the friable
taste of yo• •’ve learned
there are other ways in the wood’s
growing
if not for m•—
find hollow
find spell (TBB 6)
The opening might be read “We’ve learned through wood / we can only travel in one direction / but turn again with us” or “You’ve learned through wood / you can only travel in one direction / but turn again with us” (and so on), though Gladding has given preference to the singular speaker conventional to English-language love poems. Her translation, that is, minimizes the strangeness of the “foreign” language, as is the usual aim of translation, while her dots keep in view that the beetles’ language reflects a much more fluid and capacious sense of self or speaker than ours.
In these poems, there is no attempt like a.rawlings made to merge animal and human experience, but rendering animal experience in human language itself challenges the conventional animal/human divide, particularly when emotions like love are attributed to the nonhumans. Does this result in an anthropomorphism that impedes the recognition of the otherness of this communicative being? Several of Gladding’s strategies seem designed to avoid that. First, the perspective of the beetles in her poems diverges notably from a human perspective. Take, for instance, “Engraver Beetle Cycle,” which contains the lines “m•y sweet m•y rolled / m•y x as in xylem / cambrial phloem corridor” (TBB 8). (The phloem is the layer of the bark that conducts nutrients downward from the leaves, while the xylem transports water and nutrients from the roots in the soil.) Calling another beetle or larva or a collection thereof “my/your/our x as in xylem” is analogous to a human addressing the beloved as “my H as in honey” or “my H as in home,” or “my L as in love nest,” since true bark beetles breed and feed in the phloem and outer xylem of the tree. But we humans would not tell others we care for that they are our xylem. The adjective “cambrial” is, as far as I can determine, a neologism: it might bring to mind the cambium tissue layer located between the xylem and the phloem; it may reference the urban slang usage of “cambria” to refer to a blonde bombshell; but its primary evocation here is of the Cambria Forest in California, a rare Monterey pine forest that has been devastated by a bark beetle infestation.43 For humans, the adjective “cambrial” might characterize an environmental disaster, but for a bark beetle it would presumably denote a happy abundance of food and sociality; human and beetle perspectives diverge radically. This poem ends abruptly midphrase: “there are rumors of flight and fungi / (of light and lying) / the death of a tree’s”; we can’t determine whether that last apostrophe signals a contraction for “tree is” or a possessive. If the former, we might imagine completing the phrase, “the death of a tree’s imminent”; if the latter, perhaps the speaker is anticipating the end not of a tree but of the colony of tubular (“rolled”) pupal beetles who inhabit the tree and are nearing their adult flights out of the tree into sunlight and on to the next host tree. Bark beetles are often vectors for fungi that can kill trees, as is the case with Dutch elm disease, but fungi can also be threats to the beetles themselves, and perhaps that is how they function in these lines. In any case, to interpret what is going on in this poem, the human reader has to entertain decidedly unfamiliar perspectives.
The second strategy I see Gladding employing to counter a reductive anthropocentrism involves linguistic inventions, as already observed with “cambrial.” Like a.rawlings, Gladding playfully highlights the animacy within language itself (an extension beyond Kimmerer’s concerns), pointing to its mobility and continual evolution. But in addition, her manipulations of conventional wording also convey a difference in the language of the nonhuman other. Particularly in the series of three “Bark Beetle Fragments in Regional Dialects,” which translate engravings of different beetle species—an acknowledgment of the uniqueness of the gallery pattern carved by each species—Gladding modifies familiar English phrases to mark the distinctive perspective of beetles. “Southwestern,” for instance, which laments the way strip malls have ruined the beetles’ quiet, begins “through think on thin,” which torques the English “through thick and thin.” The poem continues: “through think on thin commercial / success going under / strip malls” (TBB 61); to paraphrase this simply as “through thinking on the thin commercial success of failing strip malls” seems insufficient since “through think on thin” invites contemplation of what thinness and thickness would mean within the wood-centered world of a beetle. Because bark has both inner and outer layers, the meaning of thin bark becomes potentially complex. Thicker bark would offer more resistance to the adult beetles tunneling into the tree; so thin bark means easier home-making. But thin outer bark (the rhytidome) might also mean less protection of beetles inside the bark from predators such as woodpeckers. Thin inner bark (phloem), might mean less nourishment available to beetles, though it also might mean fewer or less generative ducts producing resin that, in addition to healing the wounds beetles cause, can trap beetles. “Through think on thin” certainly supposes that beetles engage in thinking, and it may suggest a multifaceted meditation on what are for beetles beneficial and detrimental environmental conditions. The poem’s final line is “whole up,” which plays on “hole up”—something beetles do for much of their life cycle—but reminds readers of the communal circumstances of beetle life in which it takes many individuals to make a whole poem or engraving. Perhaps, too, “whole up” is a command for all the engravers to turn their tunnels upward; Gladding’s rubbing does reveal a series of vertical tunnels on the right side of the piece of bark (fig. 8).
Figure 8. Bark beetle rubbing and poem from Jody Gladding, Translations from Bark Beetle, 61. (By Jody Gladding; courtesy of Milkweed Editions; from Translations from Bark Beetle [Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015]; © 2015 by Jody Gladding; milkweed.org)
Another poem demonstrating this torquing of English in ways that highlight beetle-specific perspectives is the “Red Turpe
ntine Beetle (Northeastern)” dialect poem, based on a rubbing in which the tunnels are mostly parallel and relatively straight vertical lines:
lightivore
would have cut stars
but of
more than •
could chew
a fibrous skyful
black holes
all no through
but yes! horizon up against basal
lines cleanly spit
way clear !
this is o•r boredom of heaven (TBB 63)
This poem presents an even more speculative beetle or collectivity of beetles, one imagining an other who eats not bark but light—though the epistemically located beetle speaker naturally imagines hunks of sky as “fibrous.” The poem hints at a number of puns—bit off more than you/we/I could chew, gnaw through, cleanly split—and again each variation points toward bark beetle behavior and surroundings. Most delightful is the final celebratory line about our boredom of heaven, where boredom (boredome?) seems to refer positively to the action of boring through wood, stars, or sky itself.
However much fun Gladding is having as her translations’ grammar of animacy imaginatively registers a rich lifeworld for bark beetles (as well as the lively possibilities within human language), those translations always convey an ample multidimensionality in the creatures’ otherness. One of the book’s poems that is based not on a bark beetle engraving but on an aphorism from the poet Ralph Angel—“Art is an act of violence against the violent silence”—may capture the ethics of this project. For in important ways, Western humanity’s failure to listen to earth others and to recognize the full animacy and communicative power of the nonhuman world has produced a violent silence. Gladding’s lyrical elaboration of Angel’s statement ends, “the most beautiful word / is / trespass” (TBB 45). Creating these trans-species translations is a bold and perhaps even violent trespass that contributes to the breaking of that violent silence.
JONATHAN SKINNER LISTENING IN TO BIRDSONG
The kinds of poems Jonathan Skinner has written concerning birds include straightforward descriptions of birds he observes, transcriptions of the sounds of various bird calls, and recently a delightful series of poems he calls “warblers” composed about different species in accordance with particular constraints about sound and content that Skinner established. Warblers may be written only about a bird species the poet has actually seen; each poem must translate the rhythms and pitches of that bird’s song, note something about its coloring, attend to its habitat and habits, mention a distant place “since warblers link humans across hemispheres,” include words from poets writing in both North and South America, and include some nonsense in acknowledgment that “warblers are restless, hard to see, and give you a crick in the neck.”44 Skinner’s 2011 collection Birds of Tifft includes constraint-free poems that simply log the birds and other animals he has seen while walking in the Tifft Nature Preserve, or record field notes in a manner reminiscent of some of Gary Snyder’s poetry. Tifft is an urban “preserve” in Buffalo, New York, part of it on the city’s remediated former refuse dump, so that the environment recorded includes highway traffic, power lines, city lights, and industrial buildings; in this volume depicting one version of contemporary nature, Skinner observes native and invasive plants, beavers, rabbits, an overpopulation of deer, and black and white fishermen, along with birds of various habitats, shapes, and colors.45 In all these works, his project is consciously an ethical one: “Poetry might help us to use, study, and deploy animal morphologies in ways that hope to better, rather than merely exploit, the human relation with such life forms, if not to improve the welfare of the species themselves.”46
The poems I’ll consider here, where my focus is on animal expression and grammars of animacy, are not-yet-collected works in which he focuses particularly on developing responses to birdsongs he has recorded. Despite the familiarity of designating extended bird vocalizations as songs, Skinner’s attention to birdsong in his lyrics is a reminder that “we bring metaphors from the arts of music and poetry to complement our limited scientific understanding of the intricacies of animal communication.” The poems are written with a consciousness of “ongoing biocide” and the current “human war on other species,” but, like most of his other poems about birds and wildlife, rarely address either directly. Skinner’s hope is that these “poetry animals” will “allow foreign organizations into the sphere of our nervous system.”47
Although not written according to specific constraints like his “warblers,” works like “Blackbird Stanzas” should also be understood as proceduralist because they are based on both audio recordings and spectrograms of birdsongs—in this case, the song of a particular type of thrush. Skinner explains his understanding of the resources provided by procedural constraints as follows: “Procedural writing can initiate a system of feedback loops between constraint and the poem-in-process, a system that might involve multiple authors, and that models an organism’s relationship to environment. Just as constraints limit and challenge authorial agency, a procedure allows a site to determine the writing in ways less filtered through the subject, inviting more distributed agency.”48 Distributed agency—like Jane Bennett’s related notion of distributive agency—moves toward Retallack’s reciprocal alterity and an interactive sense of dynamic collective agency or authorship. Skinner is particularly interested in allowing into poems more of their sonic environments, and in the works he’s calling poetry animals, he’s interested particularly in the intersection between sound or prosody and “animal vocalizations.”49 This interest led him to conduct interviews with people working in the Bioacoustics Research Program and the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, selections from which appear in his fascinating hour-long podcast, “Animal Transcriptions.” In that podcast, which includes amazing animal sounds as well as commentary by professionals, one learns that slowing birdsong brings it closer to what birds hear because their (internal) ears have much better temporal resolution than human ears, while spectrograms can reveal to the human eye sounds and sound patterns that cannot be detected by human ears. By using technologically altered vocalizations as constraints, Skinner attempts with his poems to enhance our limited sensory equipment in ways that bring us closer to kinds of awareness that birds—along with other species that gather information from birdsongs and calls—possess.
Skinner has described his “Blackbird Stanzas” as “lyrics to a performance, a translation or transcript of eleven vocalizations of a European Blackbird” that he recorded; he slowed the recordings and produced spectrograms from them “to reveal the distinctive parts of each vocalization, modeling variety, density and rhythm for the five to eight lines of each stanza.” He derived the words for this series from the above-mentioned interviews; many of them can be heard in context on the podcast. When he performs, he uses the recording as the sound track for his “attempt to vocalize, karaoke style, the bird’s song.” Ideally, he would also move visibly through the spectrogram as he “sings,” but he doesn’t have access to technology that would animate the spectrograms. His statement of process concludes: “If in the interviews and associated poems I listen to listening, the performance of ‘Blackbird Stanzas’ listens in to listening to listen.”50 That is to say, in conducting the interviews and in composing the poems derived from their text, he listens to people who spend their working hours listening to animal sounds (these include not only birdsongs but the sounds produced, for instance, by whales and elephants, along with others in the animals’ acoustic habitats); in so doing, he listens to listening. When performing those words to the slowed birdsong, he adds another level of listening, which I understand to be listening to—and adjusting—the immediate interactions between his vocalization and the birdsong his words perform. He is, then, trying to enrich readers’ appreciation of the elaborate construction of bird calls and songs with their multiple communicative functions and to generate an aural expression of his own—his gramm
ar of animacy—that may stretch conventional syntax and usage to allow for more attentive response to bird vocalization. The series is an ecopoetic extension of Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—not looking at, but attempting to listen in or listen from within.51
The “Blackbird Stanzas” are composed in short, usually disjointed lines, but if one keeps in mind the text’s derivation from discussions of animal sound and its recording (and even more helpfully, if one listens to Skinner’s podcast), cohesive concerns emerge. The first of the lyrics, for instance, emphasizes the extraordinary power of these recordings and the transformative experience they offer:
the whole woods
connected
naturally plucked
roar
pulling us into thin air
whether we like it or not