by Lynn Keller
Sound recordings enable one to hear the acoustics of an entire habitat (audio recordings readily reveal to the experienced listener the level of biodiversity in the vicinity). The listener, both connected to that integrated ecosystem and hearing its connectivity, is inevitably transported into the airy realm of both sound waves and bird life.
As another example, the third stanza emphasizes the recovery, discovery, or analysis through sound recording of what is otherwise ineffable or lost:
they can resolve
degauss what
animals cough up
night flights
arriving with rain
recordings of ivory
Degaussing is a popular technique for destroying data on magnetic storage tapes. Degaussed data can in some circumstances be recovered; the more general implication of the first two lines is that what would otherwise be erased or simply unregistered is saved through technologies that listen to animals and the information the overheard animals divulge. “Night flights” points to one way in which sound recordings can bring us close to what we cannot record visually: they can capture bird activity in the dark. “Recordings of ivory” denotes the rare recordings of the probably extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has invested in elaborate acoustic searches for living ivory-billed woodpeckers without any sure success. Recordings of these large and striking birds made in the 1930s do exist, however; while there have been recordings since that may possibly be from survivors, those old recordings may well be the only remaining aural evidence of a species destroyed by human encroachment on their habitat. Further emphasizing the loss inherent to extinction, ivory recurs in the tenth of the stanzas in reference to elephants whose survival is threatened by poachers (“rifle shots crack”) who kill for their tusks: “ivory’s market.”52
My interpretive comments so far have not addressed the crucial importance of sound to the structure and effect of these poems. Both the spectrograms and the slowed audio recordings highlight the radical differences between parts of the bird’s song that are captured in these disjunct lines. As Skinner notes, the spectrograms provide visual signatures for specific vocalizations: “Some parts are continuous with upsweeps and downsweeps, some jagged as a series of staccato strokes, some are smeared and some are sharp, some zigzag and some straight, some compressed and some spread across the spectra, some complex and some relatively clear.” Spectrograms, he states in an instructional prompt for producing such work, can provide a “crib for translating bird song” since one can analyze the graphic image, developing one’s own code to identify different kinds of vocalization present, and from that model, in concert with the slowed audio, generate a translation. The language may “be taken from almost any source, since birds and humans, let’s face it, don’t speak the same language.” Skinner continues: “We nevertheless communicate—a vibrational communication that should be the focus of your translation, one that doesn’t end with the writing.”53
The published stanzas are accompanied by their spectrograms—as with Gladding’s images of beetle engravings, the arrangement is comparable to a facing-page translation—so that a reader can break the visual image into line units and see the source of the poet’s sonar interpretations. (Skinner also provides a link to three minutes and twenty seconds of sound recording.) Here, for instance, is the eleventh and final stanza with its spectrogram (fig. 9):
value accumulates
inside
a different kind of game
loon calls
syrinx
boxing our ears
The forceful syllables of “boxing” that resound as the climax of this stanza are visible in the double sharply peaked acoustic event near the end of the image strip. “Syrinx,” another distinctly two-syllabled word, is suggested by the simpler paired sonic events of the preceding section. In passerine birds the bilateral formation of the syrinx (birds’ vocal organ) can enable the production of two sounds simultaneously; that fact may have influenced the poet’s selection of text for the two strokes here. The shortest event in the image yields “inside” while the longest yields the stanza’s most flowing line in which the dactyl of “different” trippingly pushes the rhythm forward (the “game” of listening to birds indeed differs from the game elephants are for poachers in the preceding stanza). The section corresponding to “loon calls” has the smoothest horizontal curves, mimicked in the extended vowel of “loon” and in the gentleness of the line’s predominant consonant sounds of l and n. Studying the image helps bring into focus both the stanza’s and the thrush’s music.
Figure 9. Spectrogram of birdsong from Jonathan Skinner, “Blackbird Stanzas.” (By Jonathan Skinner; courtesy of Jonathan Skinner and BlazeVOX)
In “Poetry Animal” Skinner asserts that “poetic language structures acoustic signals before they are organized as coded meaning.” Vibrational communication, then, is always crucial to poetry, but in work where the poet opens him-or herself to the vibrations of an earth other and attempts to translate that message, it assumes tremendous ethical importance. I return to Robin Wall Kimmerer: “We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us.”54 All three of the poets discussed here have tried to imagine such access and, daringly but respectfully, to create it for their readers. All three would probably concur with the closing statement of Skinner’s prompt: “The important thing is what happens when you are done with the poem.” Each hopes to set in motion not just an enhanced listening to earth others but an enduring sense of closer, far less hierarchical relation to them.
CHAPTER 5
Global Rearrangements
Sense of Place in Twenty-First-Century Ecopoetics
The importance that place and a sense of place have held for environmental activism, environmental studies, and environmental literature could hardly be overstated. The very word “environment,” understood as the surroundings or conditions in which a person, plant, or animal lives, implies a locale, a terrain, a habitat—that is, emplacement. Usually tied to rootedness in a rural or wild location, a sense of place has been particularly valued as a counter to the alienating effects of modern industrial life. Geographer Tim Cresswell notes, “It is commonplace in Western societies in the twenty-first century to bemoan a loss of a sense of place as the forces of globalization have eroded local cultures and produced homogenized global spaces.”1 Such lamentation is not, however, what the environmentally invested poets to be discussed in this chapter are engaged in. Juliana Spahr, Forrest Gander, and Jena Osman do not celebrate the forces of globalization, but, keenly aware of unequal distribution of both resources and environmental degradation, they also do not see the globalized world as homogeneous, or as lacking a sense of place. They take as givens highly mobile societies in the Western world, with histories behind them of colonialist circulation of cultures and species; globalized flows of trade, information, and bioforms; and fluid interdependencies across geographies. While their poetry may convey an appreciation of rootedness, it does not take rootedness as a core value or as the starting point for environmental awareness and responsibility. Place in their writings is translocal and markedly in flux so that terms like “native” and “foreign” acquire complex meanings, while consequences of various intertwined forms of invasion or miscegenation—biological, ecological, martial, (neo)colonial, economic—continually evolve. For these poets of the self-conscious Anthropocene, the meaningfulness that conventionally distinguishes place from space is derived more from mobility than stability, even as they recognize that ecosystems are not infinitely flexible and adaptable so that the rate of current environmental change is of great concern.
While geographers in the twentieth century often defined place in terms of bounded permanence or through the stilling of motion, as in Yi-Fu Tuan’s widely cited desc
ription of space as motion and place as pause, far less stable visions of place operate in the poetry examined in this chapter.2 Spahr’s, Gander’s, and Osman’s explorations of forms of mobility, change, interchange, and exchange that define current experiences of place are illuminated by the groundbreaking work of Doreen Massey, also a geographer, who reconceived place as something in process in which the global and local interact, as lacking fixed boundaries, as necessarily involving multiple identities and multiple ongoing stories. While Massey, as I will explain below, challenged monolithic notions of time-space compression by emphasizing social diversity, Spahr, Gander, and Osman add to her perspective an emphasis on ecological processes and ongoing environmental degradation as crucial contributors to a globally interactive sense of place and space.
A MOBILE AND TRANSLOCAL SENSE OF PLACE
In American ecocriticism the poets most invoked in the discourse of place are Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, key figures in any examination of American environmental literature and twentieth-century environmental thought. Not surprisingly, Lawrence Buell selects as an epigraph to his chapter “Place” in The Environmental Imagination (1995) the following passage from Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild: “I describe my location as: on the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada, in the Yuba River watershed, north of the south fork at the three-thousand-foot elevation, in a community of Black Oak, Incense Cedar, Douglas Fir, and Ponderosa Pine.”3 And the first person quoted in the body of the essay is Berry, remarking on the importance to responsible stewardship of a complex knowledge of one’s place. Similarly, Robert Hass begins his more recent introduction to Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) with the following early poem of Snyder’s:
burning the small dead
branches
broke from beneath
thick spreading
whitebark pine.
a hundred summers
snowmelt rock and air
hiss in a twisted bough.
sierra granite;
Mt. Ritter—
black rock twice as old.
Deneb, Altair
windy fire4
Extending the poem’s emphasis on local particularity, Hass then provides some “facts” about whitebark pines’ adaptation to the highest elevations in the Sierra Nevada and about the geological origins of those mountains before pursuing a meditation on the history of the knowledge that makes “this location of Snyder’s poem possible.”5 Berry and Snyder, champions of agrarianism and watershed-based activism respectively, represent a powerful strain of American thought that, as Ursula Heise observes, emphasizes “the local as the ground for individual and communal identity and as the site of connections to nature that modern society is perceived to have undone.”6
Connection to and caring for one’s local place, then, has been widely understood as a form of resistance to the environmental and social degradations of modernity. The places associated with this vision of place-attachment are usually either rural—like Berry’s organic farm in Henry County, Kentucky—or wild—like the foothills of the Sierra where Snyder built the home he dubbed Kitkitdizze, the Miwok name for an evergreen shrub that grows only on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada range at altitudes between two thousand and seven thousand feet. While the stars Deneb and Altair mentioned in his poem are visible as points in the Summer Triangle, indicating a hemispheric or possibly global scale, along with a galactic context, and while Snyder’s thinking is deeply influenced by his years living in Asia and his extensive study of Chinese and Japanese philosophy, his sense of place nonetheless remains firmly rooted in the Sierra granite and what grows on it. In setting up her own contrasting project, Ursula Heise observes, “Snyder’s underlying assumption seems to be . . . that cultural identities will be shaped and reshaped by whatever place one chooses to live in, rather than that cultural migrations will in any fundamental way unsettle the terms of local inhabitation.” This kind of locally specific writing, so precisely grounded in its ecosystems—and in the case of Berry and Snyder, practiced by people invested in living sustainably off the land, minimizing their participation in the global capitalist economy—has often been illuminated through Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, which idealizes a rootedness associated with ancient local traditions of rural folk life.7 It has also frequently been discussed in terms of bioregionalism—the biogregion being, as Greg Garrard explains, an “eco-political unit that respects the boundaries of pre-existing indigenous societies as well as the natural boundaries and constituencies of mountain range and watershed, ecosystem and biome.” That approach is particularly well suited to Snyder’s politicized interest in watersheds, with their “ethnically and economically diverse stakeholders,” as geographically and ecologically sensible units for effective environmentalist mobilization.8
The literature that comes from deep knowledge of a single locale or from focused attention to a particular bioregion continues to support environmentally concerned perspectives in the self-conscious Anthropocene, as it can illuminate ecological interdependence while connecting readers to the aesthetic and spiritual sustenance that may be found in less disturbed environments. While some have represented Snyder’s and Berry’s work as anachronistic, such critiques risk mistaking space for time by identifying alternative ways of living with earlier moments on a trajectory of industrial development falsely assumed to be inevitable. When Berry in his essays urges urban dwellers not to be “industrial eaters,” for instance, he hopes to create a different future than the one we seem to be headed toward but does not imagine it will replicate the agrarian past.9 Nonetheless, his poetry, like much popular environmental writing on place, does generally bracket the translocal and global forces that so powerfully shape current lives on all continents and so crucially determine present environmental problems across the globe. The poets I will focus on in this chapter have chosen otherwise; their writing about place deliberately foregrounds awareness of global social and environmental transformations and often confronts politically charged issues of migrancy, travel, and tourism and of the ongoing social and environmental effects of colonial history.
Ideas Doreen Massey developed in her important essay “A Global Sense of Place” illuminate these poets’ representations of place.10 Massey challenges widespread understandings of postmodern “time-space compression” as lacking sufficient social differentiation. That term, introduced by David Harvey, denotes the increased speed of contemporary social life—the elision of spatial and temporal distances—resulting from widespread changes in communication technologies and in the mode of capitalist economic production and consumption.11 She responds by seeking a sense of place that is adequate to this era of movement and intermixing, one that is not reactionary but “progressive, not self-enclosing and defensive, but outward-looking.” Massey begins by critiquing some aspects of Harvey’s concept, pointing out that it ethnocentrically represents a Western, colonizer’s view, while its focus on capital fails to acknowledge the many determinants, such as race and gender, affecting how people experience space. She identifies an overlooked “power geometry of time-space compression,” according to which “different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections.” Not all those who are moving are powerful and prosperous, for instance; refugees and undocumented migrant workers move without being “ ‘in charge’ of the process,” while others stay put but are nonetheless exposed to social, political, and environmental influences from around the globe. Believing in the importance of a sense of place but wanting to avoid notions of place that involve turning inward, drawing boundaries, or cultivating a “romanticized escapism from the real business of the world,” Massey looks to the example of her own neighborhood in London. Tracing a walk down Kilburn High Road and the evidence there of myriad links to the wider world, she argues that “while Kilburn may have a character of its own, it is absolutely not a seamless, coherent identity, a
single sense of place which everyone shares.”12
Because a large proportion of the relations, experiences, and understandings that now construct a place “are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent,” Massey argues that places can be “imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings. . . . And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.” This progressive sense of place she would like to see cultivated is not static; it doesn’t “have boundaries in the sense of divisions which frame simple enclosures”; and it is understood to be full of internal differences and conflicts. For globalization does not entail simply homogenization; its uneven development can produce or exaggerate differences. In Massey’s approach, place specificity is retained but is not understood to result from some long, internalized history (as it is in Heideggerian thinking); specificity in a globalized era derives from each place being “the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations” that may “produce effects which would not have happened otherwise.” She concludes that a progressive sense of place “is a sense of place, an understanding of ‘its character’, which can only be constructed by linking that place to places beyond. A progressive sense of place would recognize that, without being threatened by it. What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place.”13
An ecocritic is likely to hear in that conclusion anticipations of Ursula Heise’s important Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), and Heise does refer to Massey’s work of this period once in her study. Heise’s book responds critically to “the insistence on individuals’ and communities’ need to reconnect to local places as a way of overcoming the alienation from nature that modern societies generate, as well as the long-standing ambivalences about the global [that] are two of the most formative and characteristic dimensions of American environmentalism.” Seeking to bring the insights of cultural theories of globalization to U.S. environmentalist and ecocritical discourse, Heise emphasizes two concepts: deterritorialization, “understood as the weakening of the ties between culture and place,” and cosmopolitanism, as a way of “thinking about environmental allegiances that reach beyond the local and the national.” Modeling the “eco-cosmopolitanism” she advocates, Heise provides readings of works of literature and film that “frame localism from a globalist environmental perspective.”14 While much indebted to Heise’s thinking and sympathetic with her call for a more global environmentalist perspective, my analysis here will not invoke deterritorialization or cosmopolitanism, in part because the poets under discussion remain keenly interested also in the differences between places and their cultural and ecological determinants. Moreover, attunement to the problematic residues of colonialism evident in the works I’ll examine by Spahr and Gander militates against embracing cosmopolitanism, which is too readily associated with privileged travel and the view of the colonizer.