by Lynn Keller
In this context Massey’s work—particularly For Space (2005)—again proves useful, now for confronting the issues of colonialism that regularly attend discussions of global place, travel, and cosmopolitanism. She opens For Space with a striking “rumination” that juxtaposes two culturally informed imaginations of the same event: the arrival of Cortéz and his soldiers at the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. Having established the very different perspectives first of Moctezuma’s people and then of the Spanish, Massey observes that we Westerners tend to treat space as “something to be crossed and maybe conquered,” making space seem like a surface, continuous and given. This “unthought cosmology” continues to carry social and political effects. Imagining other places, people, and cultures simply as phenomena on this surface, we deprive them of their own histories and trajectories (which her imagination of the Aztec perspective brought to life), making it difficult to see in our mind’s eye the histories others have been living. Pointing to the project of her book, she asks, “If instead, we conceive of a meeting up of histories, what happens to our implicit imaginations of time and space?” A second rumination involving world trade negotiations during Bill Clinton’s presidency reveals how Euro-American ways of conceiving of globalized space tend to turn space into time. That is, producing narratives of the ineluctability of neoliberal capitalist globalization, we do not imagine the cultures of other places as having their own trajectories “and the potential for their own, perhaps different, futures” and instead position them as occupying an earlier stage of what we regard as the only possible narrative. Massey concludes that rumination by asking what would happen to our conceptions of space and time and their relation if we allowed for a multiplicity of trajectories.15 The poetry examined in this chapter is invested in using the powers of the imagination to animate multiple trajectories within places and to complicate a Western tendency to see “foreign” places from the flattening or exoticizing perspective of the privileged traveler. In what follows I will return periodically to Massey’s formulations because the poets’ works seem to me to produce the socially attuned, nonstatic, and nonmonolithic global sense of place Massey called for. While Massey’s works demonstrate an awareness of environmental issues, to my knowledge she did not attempt any thorough integration of environmental concerns and ecological processes into her theorizing of place.16 These poets add to her emphasis on “networks of social relations” a penetrating awareness of dynamic networks of ecological relations.
Before turning to work by the three poets I’ve named, I’d like to observe this chapter’s understanding of poetic place in motion as it’s enacted in Ed Roberson’s “Urban Nature,” from City Eclogue. For like Snyder’s “Burning the Small Dead” and unlike other works I’ll discuss, Roberson’s sonnet describes a fixed and bounded place, though in destabilizing terms that emphasize migration. The opening lines distinguish the poem’s setting from the conventional visions of desired local places represented by rustic New England landscapes, midwestern farmland, or upscale seaside retreats of “some Hamptons garden / thing,” and insist this place does not offer the kind of natural beauty we conventionally imagine as spiritualized and uplifting. What Roberson is describing is “just a street / pocket park” in a moment of “simple quiet.” Implicitly refuting the anti-urban bias still prevalent in much environmental literature, he emphatically distinguishes this kind of quiet from a vision of blighted nature like that offered by Keats in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (“The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing”) and taken up by Rachel Carson, who used Keats’s lines as an epigraph to Silent Spring.17 This is a quiet “not the same as no birds sing, / definitely not the dead of no birds sing.” Here’s the closing sestet that follows:
The bus stop posture in the interval
of nothing coming, a not quite here running
sound underground, sidewalk’s grate vibrationless
in open voice, sweet berries ripen in the street
hawk’s kiosks. The orange is being flown in
this very moment picked of its origin.18
The poem resists thinking of nature and its valued places simply in terms of pristine landscapes or locales apart from human habitation; sweet berries ripen in the street, not just in the wilderness where Wallace Stevens gorgeously positioned them in “Sunday Morning.” (The oranges, too, allude to Stevens’s poem in which the leisured woman in her peignoir daydreams over coffee and oranges.)19 Roberson challenges the tradition of Romantic nature writing that so often situates its solitary speaker in a relatively undisturbed natural setting. His quiet spot is so only at intervals, and even then his speaker is aware, without distress, of the machine sounds and vibrations that will shortly intensify. In the scene’s urban ornithology, the birds are street hawks and airplanes.
The social and environmental costs of forced migration are not dwelt upon here, but they are suggested in that resonant closing phrase “picked of its origin.” The street hawk is probably not a Native American whose forebears were indigenous to this place; the person calling out his or her wares is likely to be, if not a recent immigrant, then one descended from an earlier immigrant generation, perhaps someone whose ancestors were “picked” from their African roots by slave traders. Yet, just as berries will ripen in city sun essentially as they do on the vine, and just as the imported orange (and the fossil fuel required for its transportation) needs to be understood as part of this decidedly unfixed urban nature, so does the “imported” person. This treasured place in urban nature, then, is not defined by intact ecosystems of native flora and fauna like those Snyder lovingly observes, or by the kind of tradition-derived practices of land-use celebrated by both Snyder and Berry and embraced in Heidegger’s “dwelling,” or by cultural continuity and ethnic homogeneity. Instead, its complex syncretism—a phrase I take from Spahr that speaks to the sense of place developed by all three poets discussed in the rest of this chapter—is produced by various kinds of ongoing trans-spatial mobility and mixing.
THE “THERE” OF JULIANA SPAHR’S WELL THEN THERE NOW
The opening poem in Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now (2011) offers a formally experimental presentation of the mobile and translocal twenty-first-century version of place-based writing I have been outlining, as the method of its construction enacts the processes of place-formation-in-movement that is one of the poem’s central concerns. Well Then There Now is very consciously a book about place. Signaling this even before the first poem, Spahr expands the usual list of acknowledgments into a section of “Acknowledgments and Other Information” that records the address where each piece was written: “at 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, California 94613,” for instance, or “at 3029 Lowrey Avenue, Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822.” Three different Hawaiian addresses, from the period between 1997 and 2003 when Spahr taught at the University of Hawai‘i, appear there, along with several California Bay Area addresses and one in Brooklyn, New York. In addition, as with “Unnamed Dragonfly Species” discussed in chapter 1, each poem is preceded by a simple silhouette map of a state or island on which the specific place of the poem’s composition appears as a targetlike spot, with the latitude and longitude of that location inscribed on the facing page above the title. These details of presentation indicate that the place-perspective of a piece of writing matters; one’s location shapes one’s awareness of and responses to the social, political, and environmental forces operating in the self-conscious Anthropocene.
The title of the volume’s opening poem, “Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours,” alludes to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” which he recited at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 as the first poet to be invited to participate in an inauguration ceremony. That sixteen-line poem about U.S. history and Americans’ relation to the land begins:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massac
husetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.20
The speaker’s blindness to the ways in which the English who settled the American colonies were themselves colonialist forces displacing indigenous people is striking, as is the propertied whiteness of his “we” and his thinking of land in terms of possession. Spahr’s poem refutes those perspectives; it speaks of “the land that was never ours” and “never to be owned,” while its use of “we” where proper grammar requires the pronoun’s objective case, “us,” defies any objectification of those who do not possess power or land. In response to Frost, “Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours” develops an alternative narrative about the complex and never-settled relation between land and its occupants, particularly its settler colonials—a narrative that highlights the power differentials important to Massey’s thinking about space. The poem’s four page-long sections (written in prose and followed by an italicized note explaining the circumstances and method of the poem’s composition) rely heavily on progressive repetition and permutation that bring to mind Gertrude Stein’s modes of insistence. This near-repetition that produces continual variation suggests multiple trajectories and perspectives within the unfolding of historical change, an instability that also opens future possibilities.21
Spahr’s poem begins with an emphasis on the existence—and the perspective—of those who are “small,” who are united by their common engagement in mundane activities like eating:
We are all. We of all the small ones are. We are all. We of all the small ones are. We are in this world. We are in this world. We are together. We are together. And some of we are eating grapes. Some of we are all eating grapes. Some of we are all eating. We are all in this world today.22
The rest of the page continues to focus on we small ones eating grapes together “in this place” today, conveying a sense of community among those who are not powerful, with some attention also to wine and the sensory character of grapes: “In the world of the grapes. In this world. In the grapes. In the grapes. In taste. In the taste. In fermentation. In fermentation. In wine. Out of the wine. In fresh tight skin. In the fresh tight skin. In seed” (WTTN 11). The second page responds directly to Frost, emphasizing labor on the land and different classes’ differing relations to the land; it questions established ideas of land ownership and possession while emphasizing how the production and consumption of food binds us to the land. Thus in the middle of the page: “Some of we were to settle. Some of we were to arrange. And the land was never ours. And the ground was never with us. And yet we were made by the land, by the grapes. We were eating the leaves of the land. The grapes of the land. The green of the land. The leaves. Sheets. And we were the land’s because we were eating and the land let some of us eat.” As the page continues, the emphasis on exclusions from the privilege of land ownership and on alienation from the land intensifies: “And yet the land was never some of ours. But the ground was never sure with us. Is never some of ours. Be never certain with us. Never will be rightly some of ours. Be correctly never certain with us. Never to be owned” (WTTN 12). The third page introduces a Saint Francis–like scene of sparrows eating grain out of “our hand” in ways that make the we of “the small ones” include birds, hands, and grains; its language of flying, flying at, pecking, and pecking back suggests social hierarchies and the struggles of those “down on the ground.” The fourth page opens, “What it means to settle. What means it arrangement” and explores, again with lots of repetition in simple but often slightly torqued syntax, not only the possible arrangement of words but the arrangements of “we” in this world and the challenges we face not as a unified entity but as various small ones together who are in different relations to power and to the land (WTTN 13–14). Some eat grapes, some plant or pick them.
The key challenge posed by the poem emerges in the following passage that expands the discourse of relation to land to consider social and political change more broadly:
How to move. How to move from settle on top to inside. How to move stabilization on the top inside. To embrace, to not settle. To embrace, not to arrange. To speak. To speak. To spoke. With the spoke. To poke away at what it is that is wrong in this world we are all in together. To push far what is with it is incorrect in this world which all the small ones are us in the unit. (WTTN 14)
Spahr seeks a changed relation to place that involves embracing what is there rather than claiming possession, dominating, and attempting to control; she seeks a shift from dominion (“on top”) to participation and nonhierarchical belonging (“inside”). This is tied to a desire to use language for political and social transformation that benefits the (human and other-than-human) “small ones” of the biosphere.
How geographical movement figures in all this becomes clear in the concluding explanatory note, which begins by describing the scene in a park in France where Spahr and her mother were tourists and from which the poem’s details emerge—including information that the person feeding sparrows was “making them perch on the thumb and eat out of the hand if they wanted any food,” though the sparrows “preferred to eat on the ground.” The poem’s mentions of grapes gain context as Spahr further explains:
I was thinking about a story I had heard about a French grandfather who left early in my father’s life, moved to Canada, and died by falling off a horse. I thought about the vines that grew in France, then came as cuttings to California, then went back to France after a blight. I thought about who owned what. And divisions . . . I came home and used a translation machine to push my notes back and forth between French and English until a different sort of English came out: this poem. (WTTN 15)
Her compositional method, then, imitates the movement back and forth between continents that enabled her to witness people in France eating grapes—grapes that grow in France only because their predecessors had been transported to America and then returned to Europe. Movement of people and plants has shaped places and will continue to do so. Spahr’s use of a translation machine generates forms of linguistic strangeness that call attention to the conventions of syntactic arrangement and naming peculiar to different languages. “Sheets,” for instance, is introduced through translation of “leaves,” both of which can be referred to as feuille in French. It also highlights linguistic hybridity and the interactive ongoing processes of language change, suggested by the integration into the otherwise English text variants of the French, picoter, meaning “to peck.”
“Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours,” then, is a poem written in Honolulu about a scene in France observed by a person of French ancestry who came from the continental United States and responds in part to a poem about the United States, a settler colonial nation, seen as a former British colony; it is written in a version of English produced by shuttling translations between French and English in ways that reenact the transcontinental movement of people and plants. The place registered in this poem is a generalized world we all occupy together, where our proximity and interconnection are more notable than any particular ecological context, but also where “our” perspectives on the place we occupy will be affected by our species (humans and sparrows have different relations to the ground), by our nationality (picoter also means to tingle or prickle, meanings a French reader would hear and ponder), and especially by our social class and occupation (do we pick grapes, own vineyards, or purchase grapes to eat?).
Juliana Spahr’s six years living in Hawai‘i had a great impact on her awareness of place and of what attention to place—to specific plants and birds, street names, posted signs, arrangements of buildings and walkways—may reveal about history, social power structures and dynamics, ecology, and environmental change. As is evident not only from her poetry but also from her prose memoir The Transformation, she was intensely conscious of having come to Hawai‘i from a very different environment and as part of
a history of colonization that implicates her, however unwillingly, in the “arriving and making different” that has preceded her.23 That making-different involved introducing nonnative plant and animal species and consequently, if unintentionally, eliminating native species; it involved deliberately transforming the landscape for development and for the production of the colonial and neocolonial wealth. This ongoing process has made Hawai‘i, though it remains a place of extraordinary beauty, “a site of huge ecological catastrophe.” The opening poem of the “Sonnets” series in Well Then There Now concludes: