Recomposing Ecopoetics

by Lynn Keller

  That the human costs of coal mining cannot be restricted to the immediate period of the accident is underscored by the book’s coda, the only newspaper reportage connected with Sago that Nowak includes. It’s an article from September 2006 that reports on the suicides of two “miners whose jobs included watching for safety hazards” inside the mine before the deadly explosion; one seems to be the dispatcher whose voice we heard earlier. He was seen by another miner after the explosion as “real nervous and he was trying to figure out what was going on, what we needed to do and who we needed to call and—” (CME 40). He’s apparently the one who recounts his own ineffectual attempts to call this person and that one (when the superintendent, the maintenance superintendent, and the safety director were all “underground”), trying with his wife’s help to locate people’s numbers in the phone book and leaving messages on answering machines an hour and a half after the explosion, when he had been instructed to get in state and federal emergency teams (CME 45, 48). Some of the responsibility for this bungling may well have been his own, yet it also appears that the company had inadequately prepared the systems that would enable its employees to respond effectively to such a disaster. The other suicide was the person who cleared the mine as safe before the two carts of miners entered it. These deaths highlight the problematic invisibility of the corporate and economic structures that are most profoundly responsible for mining disasters—rather like the invisibility of the mines in Nowak’s photo of a wooded area closed off for “active coal mining” (CME 100)—even as they point to individuals’ complicities with larger systems. Occurring nine months after the accident, they reinforce the words of a Chinese taxi driver following a mining tragedy: “what has happened will continue to haunt us for years to come” (CME 92).

  The environmental costs of extraction, too, are long lasting, and Nowak relies on pastoral tropes and values to communicate this. The dramatic contrast between the bucolic panorama of the billboard and the landscape against which it’s seen, for instance, makes clear how terribly long full recovery of the land would take. Anthropogenic change happening over time is evident in Nowak’s photos of rusted mining facilities or of abandoned home appliances in front of a crumbling shack; the striking absence of pastoral beauty in these dreary images conveys the severity of the environmental degradation as well as the poverty level of mining areas; there will be no quick fixes. How far these visual images fall short of the pastoral beauty our culture has taught us to value enforces readers’ sense of the losses imposed by coal mining.29

  Like Roberson, however, Nowak also seems wary of narrow visions that idealize or sweeten people’s ideas of nature, though his critique is directed at class-marked condescending perspectives on quaint rural folk rather than the romanticization of rural landscapes. This emerges particularly in his presentation of the first lesson, on the “historic craft” of coal flowers. The ACF materials instruct teachers to explain:

  When mining families had

  little money

  to buy decorations

  or purchase toys,

  they used

  common household products

  and coal to make

  beautiful crystal flowers.

  It was entertaining to watch

  the crystal flowers grow,

  because the changes took place

  in a relatively short period of time.

  Coal flowers were sometimes used

  as Christmas decorations

  because they resemble

  snowflakes. (CME 32)

  Although the miners’ coal flowers were white, today’s students—who can buy the necessary laundry bluing online from Martha Stewart (CME 25)—“will use / food coloring to enhance / the beauty of their coal flowers” (CME 37), suggesting that what was “entertaining” for these simple folks is insufficient for those who study them. How this relates to ideas of nature and the natural is suggested by the assessment page for this exercise:

  Place the experiment

  in its historical context

  by discussing why

  this activity might be

  a natural one

  for coal mining families

  in the late 1800s

  and early 1900s. (CME 50)

  Are students being invited to regard being too poor to buy toys as a “natural” condition for miners? Convenient assumptions about what is natural for others can blind us to social and economic inequities and their consequences. The immediate commitment of what Nowak calls his “social poetics” is to social justice, yet he demonstrates a keen understanding of the thorough intertwining of social and environmental ills.30 Some readers have failed to see the environmental concerns woven into Coal Mountain Elementary. Don Featherston, for instance, asserts, “Although Nowak documents the costs of the coal industry in human life and livelihood, he does not address the costs to the environment.”31 Such readings demonstrate the continued critical tendency to impose a separation between environmental and social justice.

  Although infrequently introduced, miners’ longings for remembered green landscapes and the associated pleasures of clean water and fresh air provide a crucial emotional counterpoint to Coal Mountain Elementary’s otherwise unrelenting presentation of suffocating air and gas-filled tunnels, deadly explosions, dead bodies, blackened, rubble-filled, and toxified landscapes. In the final section involving the lesson called “Coal Camps and Mining Towns,” Nowak includes several passages of journalism in which Chinese people recall with pastoral nostalgia beautiful farmland and streams one could drink from, fish from, or swim in where now “mountains of coal waste” are piled and streams are poisoned (CME 136). In one of these passages, reference to blood invites the reader to connect what has happened to the land with what happened to the bodies of the trapped miners who died of carbon monoxide poisoning:

  Some residents later talked about the village’s founding myth, an old fable about how the beautiful village was founded in ancient times with a small lake in its center. But one day, according to the fable, a smart man from southern China came and stole the village frog, bringing ruin to Shangma Huangtou. “I don’t believe this myth,” Mr. Lin, the village chief, said. “I believe there’s no water because of the coal mines. The earth is like the human body. And the water is like the blood in your veins. But now there’s no water; no blood.” (CME 140)

  Here’s how an earlier passage in the Sago testimony described the mechanism by which carbon monoxide kills:

  As it gradually builds, you have side effects, nausea, headache. Then at some point in time it gets to the point to where your respirations aren’t effective, because carbon monoxide binds to your red blood cells more higher, more affinity—what we call affinity to your red blood cells than pure oxygen does. So when your red blood cells are transporting oxygen, they’re not really transporting oxygen, they’re transporting carbon monoxide, which cannot be used. And that cycle stays. And it’s a very hard bond to break between the carbon monoxide and the red blood cells. (CME 129)

  The association between the two passages (recalling also the Chinese prime minister’s description of a mining tragedy as a “lesson paid for in blood” [CME 5]) underscores the severity and likely irreversibility of the damage done to the earth in this mining area, where the earth is rendered effectively dead. It serves, too, as a reminder of the inseparability of human and environmental health, both of which are profoundly threatened by the Great Acceleration in which China, through its pursuit of American-style industrialization and economic growth, now participates.

  “MINIMUM HUMAN SUBSISTENCE EXPERIMENT”: MYUNG MI KIM’S PENURY

  Nowak’s work connects to that of Myung Mi Kim through the two poets’ use of formal structures and techniques that reflect awareness of language’s limitations and its potential distortion under political, social, or emotional pressure. The verbatim transcripts in Coal Mountain Elementary are full of places where speakers stumble or break off, unable to find adequate words, particularly around
traumatic moments like the discovery of the bodies and the single survivor in the Sago mine: “and there they were, all—all—Jim’s working on McCloy, because he’s alive, you know, he’s—and I go directly to the opposite side of him and start checking for pulse and—you know, any breathing on the guys” (CME 119). The very first newspaper reportage in the volume closes with a Chinese miner’s widow announcing, “ ‘I have no language for my feelings. . . . And there’s no way anybody else can understand it’ ” (CME 2). On the next page, however, the American speaker recalls being troubled by the unseasonable January thunderstorms that may have sparked the mine explosion; uncomfortable with the weather, this person longed for the reassurance of an explanatory “old wive’s tale,” feeling, “there’s got to be a tale of some sort, you know.” By constructing a book that works via juxtaposition and without added words, but that does tell stories nonetheless, Nowak respects both the need for “a tale of some sort” and the inability of language’s denotative range to reach extreme emotions or experiences.

  Myung Mi Kim pushes further toward the limits of verbal expression and what Joan Retallack has discussed as an “unintelligibility” perhaps necessary if poetry is going to reach beyond conventional understandings and ideologies.32 Kim employs extremely pared-down fragmented language and large spaces of visualized silence as if she can only gesture toward all her words are to convey. Her formal experimentalism attempts to produce something that addresses “the problem of [the presupposition of] [there already exists] a language for” what she needs to say—that is, it strives to register “what is excluded in the sociohistorical index” and “that which is emergent [irreducible] in the cultural order.”33 In addition, much of the language Nowak and Kim use is lifted from media reporting—or, in Kim’s case, at least sounds as if it comes from journalism or from legal and military documents—so that each volume implicitly acknowledges how mediated our approach to understanding other people’s experience, “what passes for the actual,” has become.34 In a work about penury—extreme poverty, privation, or lack—Kim’s always minimalist forms assume particular mimetic power.

  Kim, who emigrated from Korea with her family when she was nine, writes often of the difficulties encountered by those displaced from their homelands and native languages. In her 2009 book Penury, as in her other volumes, the ways in which traits of speech mark one as a foreigner and subject one to prejudice and economic restriction are a recurrent concern. However, more directly related to the environmental justice issues that are my focus here are the portions of the text that suggest refugees’ struggles for subsistence and evoke the effects on human survival of environmental damages wrought by industrialization and by warfare. I say “suggest” and “evoke” because in Kim’s pared-down and space-filled writing a single word often has to do the work that might conventionally be done by a paragraph or stanza. Her words are like those that float up as one turns the Magic 8-Ball, mysterious, promising, weighted with significance. Or to offer a more aural analogy, appropriate to work in which sound is important: the reader is like someone leaning in to listen closely when a large choir sings at the level of a whisper, able to catch only suggestive bits of the lyrics, suggestions of a scene or situation. Particularly in the early sections of the volume, those situations often involve people on the deprived side of “the Great Divergence” as Kim explores the sources of dire poverty, famine, and want, particularly among displaced populations.35 Militarization figures among them, including torture and strategies that involve such weapons as deliberate starvation though destruction of cropland and crops. Other environmental factors that might or might not be anthropogenic, like extended drought, also come in. In Kim’s work, it’s not always clear whether people are displaced because of war, or because of environmental devastation, or because driven by economic need. This conveys how the three are in fact so often intertwined, just as anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic environmental changes in a particular region often reinforce each other. (Farming techniques and deforestation, for example, may exaggerate the consequences of drought.)

  The situations alluded to in Penury might speak to Korean history in particular—for instance, as Angela Hume has noted, the famines endured in North Korea in the 1990s and again in recent years.36 Yet the generalizable language suggests that these situations are widespread. Here, for instance, are three pages within the section titled “fell (for six multilingual voices)” where military occupation and tools of torture figure, as do bits suggesting mass migration by poor women to find work as housemaids, a situation in which many are abused:

  : | Measure streets by the number of uniforms

  : | It’s the pitch of the cry that carries

  : | Hunger noise thirst noise fear noise

  : | Inside acts conducted outside

  : | Decades of continuous drought

  : | Weapon and deed

  : | Whether the house has windows, whether the windows have glass

  : | The dirt air

  : | Of the tens of thousands of women who leave each year

  : | Electric baton rifle butts

  : | Fifty cents more and we go there

  : | Calculated withholding of food (P 51–52)

  . . .

  : | The epidemic phase of famine

  : | Sea surface temperature urban heat island

  : | Stripped bark from pines and boiled it—and swallowed it

  : | Housemaids elsewhere

  : | Sacrifices to the Altar of Land and Grain

  : | Foreign Employment Bureau (P 54)

  The passages suggest multiple circumstances that might be producing what Laura Westra, among others, has termed “ecological refugees,” a category that in her use encompasses environmental refugees—those who migrate because of a marked environmental disruption or deterioration that jeopardizes their existence or seriously degrades their quality of life—along with the more recent category of climate refugees, and those fleeing industrial and chemical hazards.37 The people in Kim’s poem who are reduced to eating boiled pine bark are clearly starving, perhaps because of the decades of drought. The drought may be caused by global warming (“sea surface temperature urban heat island”), though one can imagine other factors unmentioned by Kim that might contribute to crop failures or desertification. The famine may have been intensified by military tactics involving “calculated withholding of food” (an earlier poem speaks of “withholding . designed to starve the whole region into submission” [P 7]). Regardless of the specific causes, environmental disruption contributes to people’s misery and to their seeking employment abroad. Attempts to track the cultures and places from which Kim draws her cultural details point all over the globe and even back in time to the myths and practices of the earlier Aztec and Taino people. The marks that precede each line on the pages I quoted—a colon followed by a space and a vertical line [ : | ] suggest, as C. J. Martin has noted, the musical repeat sign;38 I take that as an indication that the things listed are recurring phenomena rather than singular occurrences. What Kim offers are fragments of specific examples that speak to worldwide problems. Significantly, lines early in the volume echo the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948; “freedom of residence / freedom of movement” (P 10) are rights affirmed in Article 13.1, “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence, within the borders of each state.” Kim’s minimalistic lines quietly insist that violations of these universal rights are pervasive.

  That such violations now involve specifically environmental injustices is reinforced by later lines on that same page: “as history knows / what justice looks like // industry’s station / street by street // smelting is in progress” (P 10). Smelting, the fiery, energy-intensive process by which metal is extracted from ore, tends to be highly polluting, releasing hydrogen fluoride, sulfur dioxide (the source of acid rain), oxides of nitrogen, along with a range of heavy metals (lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and so on), often carried in dust that poll
utes soil and surface waterways. Sulfuric acid and contaminant-containing slag are also byproducts. Smelters for iron, zinc, lead, copper, aluminum, and other metals are located around the globe, from Arizona to Australia, Bahrain to Sweden, Ghana to India, and numerous health problems are associated with the chemicals they release. At a later point in the volume, Kim probably points to the health hazards posed by smelters when she mentions “nitrogen oxides, heavy metal (mercury) deposits” (P 73) and on the next page presents lines that might be spoken by a health worker treating someone suffering heavy-metal poisoning: “Do you eat berries, mushrooms, fish, and game? / Most likely how it entered your body.” Toxins are often concentrated high in the food chain, as in fish and game, while mushrooms readily absorb heavy metals and other chemical pollutants (and in some cases, break them down, contributing importantly to bioremediation).

  Mention of these wild foods that one might hunt and forage and which in a nontoxic region would provide a very healthy diet points to the role that pastoral elements play in this volume. As was the case in Nowak’s volume, allusions to pastoral landscapes and versions of the locus amoenus in Kim’s book provide resonant contrasts to the degraded landscapes of the present on which the poet focuses. As in Coal Mountain Elementary, in Penury evocations of the pastoral are infrequent and not much attached to the present. Nonbuilt nature, when mentioned, tends to be clearly disturbed or else threatening. A stranded cow bellows; there’s mention of the largest rat ever and of a canary yellow rock that’s probably carnotite, a radioactive uranium-venadium ore. One line describes a massive fish die off: “When the fish die all at once and appear on the bank all at once” (P 43); there’s mention of extensive land cleared for military tank traffic. On one page where a pastoral scene appears—“Rolling country small poplar bluffs”—the context suggests the property is being transferred to someone powerful in exchange for the release of prisoners. And, as we’ve just seen, eating “berries, mushrooms, fish, and game” is mentioned in connection with toxicity. By and large, pastoral pleasures seem drastically attenuated if not inaccessible. Jonathan Bate has drawn attention to Raymond Williams’ insight that “the better life is always just behind us, ‘over the last hill.’ . . . Williams portrays rural nostalgia as an escalator reaching further and further back into the past” and ultimately back to Eden. In this sense, Kim’s presentation exaggerates a trait of all pastoral. Such myths “of the natural life which exposes the ills of our own condition,” Bate notes, are “necessary imaginings”: they may help check anthropocentric “instincts” toward what he calls “self-advancement.”39