Recomposing Ecopoetics

by Lynn Keller

  We tried not to notice but as we arrived we became a part of arriving and making different.

  We grew into it but with complicities and assumptions and languages

  and kiawe and koa haole and mongooses. [species introduced into Hawai‘i]

  With these things we kicked out certain other things whether we meant to or not.

  Asking what this means matters.

  And the answer also matters. (WTTN 19)

  Much of the book pursues the answer.

  In “Sonnets,” that pursuit involves reconsidering the role of individual awareness and personal speech, partly by juxtaposing meditations on, for instance, the relation of the individual to collectivities or of takers to those whose land has been taken with facing pages displaying statistics of Spahr’s own blood work—for example, “glucose at 111 milligrams per decaliter / creatinine at 0.9 milligrams per decaliter / . . . rapid plasma reagin titer at 1:2 / flourescent treponemal antibody, absorbed at nonreactive” (WTTN 26). This intimate information, registered via “norms and abnormalities and their percentages,” defines Spahr as a bounded singular entity and functions as a kind of parodic version of the confessional lyric. “Things should be said more largely than the personal way” (WTTN 23), Spahr asserts, so the final pages abandon the bloodwork and gesture beyond an enclosed notion of personhood. Speaking of a “we” that includes earlier generations of arrivants, Spahr explains the psychology of “our response” to a lush landscape where “this growing and this flowing into all around us confused us” as “we couldn’t tell where we began and where we ended with the land and with the others” (WTTN 28). In this context the idea that the land was never ours resonates specifically with the situation of the settler colonials:

  And because we could not figure it out bunkering was a way for us to claim what wasn’t really ours, what could never really be ours and it gave us a power we otherwise would not have had and we believed this made the place ours.

  But because we were bunkered, the place was never ours, could never really be ours, because we were bunkered from what mattered, growing and flowing into. (WTTN 29)

  A better if still compromised relation to the colonized place is achieved by “some of we” arrivants who let the place “grow in our own hearts, flow in our own blood” (WTTN 29), where, unlike levels of antigens or minerals, it is presumably an unmeasurable yet crucial presence. More bounded notions of personhood, then, are linked to a more environmentally damaging, immobile understanding of place (not grasping its growing and flowing) and a tragically restricted response to it.

  The essay that follows, “Dole Street,” records what Spahr learned about this place by walking up and down the street on which she lived and worked, integrating researched history with what she herself observed as she moved through it, paying particular attention to stickers displayed on cars and to street names. A public sculpture by George Segal, Chance Meeting—notably inappropriate because of its “inattentiveness to the local”—which realistically represents three “haole” (Caucasian, foreign) people “dressed for late fall on the east coast” provides one center for her meditations on the connections that form a place. As Spahr sees it, “three haoles never meet by chance in Hawai‘i,” while other details of the street and the haole names of the streets intersecting Dole point to connections that underscore deliberately established lines of power. Speaking in terms that echo Massey’s ideas about power-geometry, Spahr characterizes Dole Street around the university, where no buildings are named after Hawaiians, as “a closed system of sorts, one that illustrates how power clusters in close patterns on top of geography” (WTTN 41). Her use of “on top” recalls the challenge to settler colonials of “how to move from settle on top to inside” posed in “Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours.” Identifying the figures behind each successive street name yields a history of how nonnative people and plants have taken over the island, transformed its landscape and ecology, drastically lowered its water tables, and altered the lives of its people.

  Like Massey, Spahr is keenly aware that a place has multiple identities for its diverse inhabitants. She several times uses the figure of the contour lines on a topographic map to communicate her sense of the non-intersecting place identities that “swirl” within a single locale, along with a more dynamic image of the various biological systems that energize the mammalian body:

  While the story of Dole and Wilder and Spreckels is not my story, I am part of Dole Street’s swirl of connection whether I like it or not. A swirl that is like the system of the separate lines on the topographic map that are inside each other but are not a spiral and never really meet. Like the systems that circulate fluids and energy throughout the body but never mix. (WTTN 47)

  The final section of “Dole Street” considers and rejects simple syncretism as a way to conceptualize places like this where multiple cultures, nationalities, and species from different ecosystems have interacted (and continue to interact) in complicated ways: “Simple syncretism has been used again and again in Hawai‘i to erase the power dynamics that make it a colonial state” (WTTN 48). Like Massey, Spahr is committed to recognizing the very different experiences of different participants in the “unchance meetings” in Hawaiian history and geography. The challenge, then, is to contribute to a complex syncretism that is nondamaging culturally and environmentally:

  I need to think about Dole Street’s history because I am a part of Dole Street as I walk up and down it. I came to it as part of this history. As a stereotypical continental schoolteacher, I need to think about how to respect the water that is there, how not to suck it all up with my root system, how to make a syncretism that matters, how to allow fresh water to flow through it, how to acknowledge and how to change in various unpredictable ways. (WTTN 49)

  In closing she offers as a model of such complex syncretism the image of the artist Kim Jones who (as Mudman) constructed a large boxy nest of loosely tied sticks and mud, an apparatus that “looks like the land,” which he carried around on his back—a striking contrast, one might note, to the “simple oneness” and rooted order of Heidegger’s ideal Black Forest farmhouse. “Nests,” Spahr concludes, “draw things together and have many points of contact. They swirl into a new thing. All sorts of items end up in them. I found one the other day on Dole Street that was full of twigs and leaves and feathers and gum and plastic string” (WTTN 50). Place, then, becomes an energetic aggregate of multiple distinct experiences that are nonetheless touching one another, made from the materials of one locale, which turn out to be materials from a vast range of places.

  The dependency of sense of place upon one’s cultural positioning, and the interaction of different groups’ relation to place, is explored quite differently in the poem that follows, titled “Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another.” As she did in “Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours,” Spahr offers at the end of this poem a clear explanation of her sources and compositional process—a process that, again using a translation machine, itself enacts some of the dynamics being examined. Reading, one first has the unsettling experience of a text that doesn’t quite make sense, but in which certain preoccupations are clear. Later, one receives information that adds to and clarifies some aspects of that reading experience, but does not erase its strangeness, its foreignness. Without knowing anything about the poem’s generation—that is, as one reads for the first time—one can readily discern its preoccupation with “the problems of analogy,” which suggests the inability to see something for what it is when one insists on seeing it in terms of likeness to something else one already knows. In the Hawaiian context, that presumably includes the desire to make Hawai‘i more like places familiar to those coming from elsewhere, so that, unable to see and respect what was there already as a complete and well-functioning social and ecological system, settler colonials not only introduced the plants and animals they knew, but also imposed “western concepts of government, trade, money.” “The problem of a
nalogy” may also refer to the way in which introduced plants were biologically enough like native ones to take over their ecological niche, and sufficiently not alike to wreck havoc on the ecosystem, producing “great and extremely fast modification.” One gleans these things from a text that seems nonetheless chaotic, in which syntax is often incomplete and disturbance is palpable:

  what we know is like and unalike

  whereas one continues being diverse formed assemblies

  whereas the problems of the analogy

  whereas the sight of the sea

  whereas the introduction of tree of heaven and cow

  also continue being like the way of the a‘o

  then again the sight of the sea

  again a series of great and extremely fast changes

  what us knows is like and unalike

  as we continues to be the various formed assemblies

  as the sight of the sea

  as the introduction of exotic, alien plants and animals (WTTN 57)

  The text gives its readers a visceral experience of disruption, not unlike the kind of disruption produced by “the arrival to someplace differently.”

  With the explanation at the poem’s end, much becomes clearer, while the reader’s experience of linguistic displacement remains. Readers learn, for instance, that the repeating phrases, “the view from the sea” and “the view from the land,” derive from ethnographic historian Greg Dening’s argument that these two views define the Pacific—the former being “the view of those who arrived from elsewhere” and the latter of “those who were already there” (WTTN 71).24 These views are essentially the two perspectives Massey brought to life in the opening gambit of For Space. “These poems,” Spahr explains, “are about the hashing that happens as these two views meet.”

  As a foreigner come to Hawai‘i, Spahr knew little of the native perspective: “I knew that when I looked around anywhere on the islands that most of what I was seeing had come from somewhere else but I didn’t know where or when. I was not yet seeing how the deeper history of contact was shaping the things I saw around me” (WTTN 70). Attempting to gain further knowledge and understanding of the place she had come to live in—that is, attempting to get closer to the Hawaiian view from the land rather than the colonials’ view from the sea—she enrolled in an ethnobotany course. She also consulted books and websites, which she lists, about Hawaiian plants and their traditional uses, traditional Hawaiian agriculture, literature, and language. In Massey’s terms, such readings help one appreciate the vibrant alternative trajectories within Hawaiian history. Spahr incorporated text from the material she was reading into the drafts of this set of poems, which “open with the view from the sea and end with the view from the land and are about the hashing that happens” when they meet. To register that hashing (not unlike the “duplicitous negotiation, miscalculation, bloodshed, rout, retreat, and readvance” Massey describes as the process of Cortéz’s conquest),25 she also incorporated a quote: “The introduction of exotic (alien) plants and animals as well as Western concepts of government, trade, money, and taxation began a series of large and extremely rapid changes.”26 Spahr put her drafts through the machine that “translated [her] English words between the languages that came to the Pacific from somewhere else: French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese.” She subsequently wove together parts of those multiply translated versions according to “patterns from the math that shows up in plants” or according to her own perceptions of “the shapes of things” around her (WTTN 71). Such a compositional process attempts to convey place as a dynamic construction resulting from the complex interaction of differentially empowered cultures and from the constant movement of human and other-than-human populations.

  The writing that emerges constitutes Spahr’s deliberate alternative to nature poetry, which she criticizes for tending to include too little context—the same complaint that Massey levels against the nonprogressive sense of place. Spahr explains that she had been

  suspicious of nature poetry because even when it got the birds and the plants and the animals right it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat. And it wasn’t talking about how the bird, often a bird which had arrived recently from somewhere else, interacted with and changed the larger system of this small part of the world we live in and on.

  This work she produced instead was in what she came to understand as “the tradition of ecopoetics,” which she defines as “a poetics full of systematic analysis that questions the divisions between nature and culture” (WTTN 69, 71).

  While Spahr creates a dynamic sense of place that renders any locality also a place of global connections and interactions, local specificity of the kind that is cultivated by, say, Snyder still retains an important place in her work. The volume’s closing poem, “The Incinerator,” aptly demonstrates how Spahr’s project is concerned with quite specific places, even as these lead into the larger contexts of the transnational global environmental and social issues those places may epitomize; as one refrain in that poem has it, “As I write this other stories keep popping up” (WTTN 139). The first section of “The Incinerator” personifies the southern Ohio town where Spahr grew up, Chillicothe, so that the speaker has sex (she uses a cruder term) with what is ambiguously a person and also a specific place with a particular geography that includes unglaciated and glaciated areas, hills and flatlands, with named rivers and geological features—the Scioto, Swiger Knob. (Its geographical specificity is comparable to the biological specificity of the animal and plant species cataloged in the immediately preceding poem, also about her Ohio childhood, “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache.”) In subsequent sections of “The Incinerator,” details of Spahr’s family situation, such as her father’s precarious employment at a radio station owned by an upper-class woman who kept an eye on her employees through the station’s bathroom window, emerge via disjunctive bits. That situation, however, serves to anchor a broader interrogation of what social class means in the United States, where Chillicothe is part of the impoverished region, Appalachia, and of how being of the working or middle class there relates to levels of poverty and prosperity in the rest of the nation and in other parts of the globe. Like place, class emerges as relational, so that the class position of those in one town or region can’t be considered apart from the larger context: “For if,” Spahr declares late in the poem, “we were middle class on the block, and lower class in the nation, we were upper class in the world, or in other words, the terms were so relationally slippery they were hard to define” (WTTN 151). She expresses worry about categorization and the way in which generalized identity categories, such as those of gender, may exaggerate commonalities while obscuring differences: in the context of international trade agreements like NAFTA, she tries “to think about” women of different nations engaged in various forms of labor, but “the categories were not equal: working class US women and then just any woman from the global south, as if these categories had any relationship between them” (WTTN 152). Local particulars matter—it is at the local level that distinctions can be most sensitively registered—but because alone they are insufficient for understanding a place or one’s place in the social or ecological fabric, the focus of Spahr’s poems is never restricted to a stable and bounded locality. Fractured by the multiple planes of its power geographies, “there” in Well Then There Now is a mobile, expansive, heterogeneous, and highly relational place.

  “FOREIGN” PLACES IN FORREST GANDER’S CORE SAMPLES FROM THE WORLD

  Spahr’s concern with specific places gives to Well Then There Now a documentary cast that is shared by Gander’s Core Samples from the World, to which I will turn momentarily. In “Dole Street” and “2199 Kalia Road,” Spahr even includes snapshots that document observations she makes about the places she describes, supporting her exposure of the social and environmental underbelly of the paradisal visions of Hawai‘i’s tourist literature. Notab
ly, Spahr understands the tradition of documentary in which she works as itself highly mobile. This becomes evident through the several allusions in the epilogue that concludes both “The Incinerator” and the volume to Muriel Rukeyser’s powerful documentary poem from 1938, also about Appalachia, “The Book of the Dead.” The opening of Spahr’s epilogue, “These are the roads we take,” alludes to the investigative journey Rukeyser introduces in her opening line, “These are the roads to take when you think of your country.” Spahr also incorporates Rukeyser’s closing line, “seeds of unending love,” into her own final lines.27 Spahr’s epilogue revisits the geography of the opening section of “The Incinerator,” moving again over the particular landforms and place names around Chillicothe and blending them into a more expansive animated vision suggesting the flows and movement of globalized space: “Streams going off in all directions. / Going off in all directions, / the road” (WTTN 155).

  A mobile documentary impulse is strong in Forrest Gander’s Core Samples from the World (2011) as well, and here photography plays a more central role, as it allows access to places neither the poet nor the reader may have visited in the flesh. Core Samples is another volume concerned with traveling (literally as well as imaginatively) to other continents and cultures, generating through “the roads you take” another version of a global sense of place. For while we think of place most often in association with “home base or home range,”28 the place sense acquired by those who visit places even briefly may yield environmentally sensitive place-based writing. Visitors’ writing can reflect superficial or inaccurate understandings of a place and its ecological and social networks—hence Spahr’s disparagement of tourists’ “747 poems”—but environmental historian Kate Brown rightly points out that “traveling is not always an appropriation . . . traveling can be a form of negotiation, an unraveling of certainties and convictions and a reassembling of the past, aided by strangers who generously open their doors to reveal histories that are in play, contingent, and subjective.”29 Of the eight extended series in Core Samples, four recount journeys taken by Gander as an internationally known poet and translator. These pieces whose titles identify the place visited employ the originally Japanese form haibun, a combination of prose and haiku that, appropriately, was often used for travel journals and has spread to many languages and cultures. The other four poems employ various forms of free verse lyric, often with repetition of lines or phrases, in response to evocative documentation of particular places and the communities or families living there by three fine-art photographers from the United States and Mexico, Raymond Meeks (whose work is the basis for two poems), Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia.