The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, Ed. by Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep, Ahsahta Press, 2012.
arcadiaproject.net/
This nearly 600-page anthology brings together seminal work in the genre of the pastoral as it has evolved into the 21st century. The book's sections on New Transcendentalisms, Textual Ecologies, Local Powers, and The Necropastoral indicate the range of work being represented. Featuring some of the most provocative and innovative poets of the current moment, this anthology has been curated not only with an eye to an exhilarating reading experience, but to the literature and creative writing classrooms as well. An accompanying web site with a teachers' guide will make this volume especially valuable for students and teachers.
Contributors: Emily Abendroth, Will Alexander, Rae Armantrout, Eric Baus, Dan Beachy-Quick, John Beer, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Sherwin Bitsui, Kamau Brathwaite, Susan Briante, Oni Buchanan, Heather Christle, Stephen Collis, Jack Collom, Phil Cordelli, T. Zachary Cotler, Brent Cunningham, Christopher Dewdney, Timothy Donnelly, Michael Dumanis, Camille Dungy, Marcella Durand, Lisa Fishman, Rob Fitterman, Forrest Gander, Merrill Gilfillan, C. S. Giscombe, Peter Gizzi, Jody Gladding, Johannes Göransson, Chris Green, Arielle Greenberg, Richard Greenfield, Sarah Gridley, e. tracy grinnell, Gabriel Gudding, Joshua Harmon, Nathan Hauke, Lyn Hejinian, Mary Hickman, Brenda Hillman, Kevin Holden, Paul Hoover, Erika Howsare & Kate Schapira, Brenda Iijima, Sally Keith, Karla Kelsey, Amy King, Melissa Kwasny, Brian Laidlaw, Maryrose Larkin, Ann Lauterbach, Karen An-hwei Lee, Paul Legault, Sylvia Legris, Dana Levin, Eric Linsker, Alessandra Lynch, J. Michael Martinez, Nicole Mauro, Aaron McCollough, Joyelle McSweeney, K. Silem Mohammad, Laura Moriarty, Rusty Morrison, Erin Mouré, Jennifer Moxley, Laura Mullen, Melanie Noel, Kathryn Nuernberger, Peter O'Leary, Patrick Pritchett, Bin Ramke, Stephen Ratcliffe, Matt Reeck, Marthe Reed, Evelyn Reilly, Karen Rigby, Ed Roberson, Lisa Robertson, Elizabeth Robinson, Craig Santos Perez, Leslie Scalapino, Standard Schaefer, Brandon Shimoda, Eleni Sikelianos, Jonathan Skinner, Gustaf Sobin, Juliana Spahr, Jane Sprague, Fenn Stewart, Adam Strauss, Mathias Svalina, Arthur Sze, John Taggart, Michelle Taransky, Brian Teare, Tony Tost, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Cathy Wagner, Elizabeth WIllis, Jane Wong, and C. D. Wright.
This hefty and gorgeously designed anthology offers an unusual take on pastoral poetry, which might be defined as poems humbled by nature. The editors of this book gathered nature poems from contemporary experimental poets, many of them under 40 years old, to present the natural world through the eyes of, as Corey says in his introduction, “a digital native with dirt between one’s toes,” representing a movement in poetry toward what is sometimes referred to as “ecopoetics.” Many of these poems speak from a natural world in flux and crisis, registering the degradation of the environment from all angles as well as human encroachment on it: “Starlings in the magnolia tree crackle, static, lightning: a helicopter floats overhead,” writes Susan Briante in “The End of Another Creature.” Of course, they also sing nature’s beauty, as does John Taggart, who describes the “white deer the animal the true animal body no jewelry.” The editors also offer a fairly comprehensive tour of contemporary poetic forms and modes, from mostly traditional lyrics and long poems to prose poems, concrete poems, colleges, and other pieces that might best be described as visual art with words, such as Robert Fitterman’s “Zoomburb.” There is a lot here, from well-known writers like Brenda Hillman and Forrest Gander to up-and-comers like Amy King and John Beer. This could be the rare poetry anthology that sticks. - Publishers Weekly
1. The Arcadia Project is not in the least a conclusive project, but rather quite inconclusive. As stated in the Introduction: “an anthology such as this one must be a living and motile assemblage.”
2. Editors Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep do not contribute any of their own poetic work. This cuts both ways, as while it shows a measure of humility on the parts of any editor not to grandstand it is also nearly always worth having an editor’s own work (if existent) on hand for clarity of comparison’s sake within the presentation of any selection. How a poet writes interestingly reflects on how a poet reads.
3. Corey pens the Introduction, attesting: “certain tendencies are discernible in the work presented here, all of it first published after 1995” and that “Postmodern pastoral offers a means of mapping the shifting terrain of that world while maintaining its ethical consciousness that the map must never be mistaken for the territory.”
4. Waldrep doesn’t add one word of his own to the book itself. But elsewhere: http://arcadiaproject.net/the-woods-the-technology/ He offers up that it was questions such as:
Why did those of us who cared, and wrote, into and about the environment in innovative forms have to keep explaining our practice to those who insisted that “nature poetry” honor its Romantic inheritances? What indeed is “nature poetry,” or could it be, or should it be, in our collective moment?
Which factored into how the anthology came to be, and he adds:
Between 2008 and 2011 Josh and I sifted through hundreds of books—published since 1995 by North American writers, generously defined—as well as hundreds of submissions that came in over our electronic transom, looking for work that would guide us into the forest and try to show us something: work that would leave us alone together (in or in spite of our discrete alonenesses); work that challenged us and terrified us and moved us, that spoke to or around or from within our ecological predicament as 21st-century human creatures.
The resulting anthology is not meant to be definitive, rather provocative and generative, an early draft version of an ongoing conversation between a wide array of poets and the world we live in.
5. The lack of having any such editorial presentation of the framework behind the book’s conception within the book itself feels a disservice to readers.The resulting anthology is not meant to be definitive, rather provocative and generative, an early draft version of an ongoing conversation between a wide array of poets and the world we live in.
6. As presented, there’s little tying together of these texts. They are left as isolated cries in a wilderness of language.
7. Poems are divided into four sections: “New Transcendentalisms,” “Textual Ecologies,” “Local Powers,” and “Necro/Pastoral” without any explicit rendering of what may or may not be meant by any of these broadly inclusive and quite permeable categorizations.
8. Questions linger, such as why not include some prose? Both statements of any kind from contributors and/or fiction, non-fiction, or works of theoretical positioning.
9. There’s a band but no bandwagon. Dozens of wheels but no cart.
10. As a reader I yearn to relate these texts in some way. To locate some vein or—what one feels is heard as a bad word by many poets these days—tradition within which the work does participate and indeed does seek continue. Of course doing so may prove some “Romantic inheritances” unavoidable.
11.
“God’s art,” Dante says in De Monarchia, “which is nature.” In our own arts, striving to speak, with words, pictures, gestures, buildings, assemblings of objects in ecologies of feeling-thought, we in turn create a little nature of we are, ideas of Man.
- Robert Duncan “San Francisco, June 1968”
12. I note obvious semblances of such “ecologies of feeling-thought” throughout this book, but aside from my own knowledge of where interest in Duncan happens to be shared within the critical work of some contributors (notably Stephen Collis and Peter O’Leary) I find little to nothing which directly mentions, let alone addresses, his work and/or influence.- Robert Duncan “San Francisco, June 1968”
13. It is similarly the case with Ronald Johnson. I especially keep wondering why nothing of his is included… The Shrubberies (Flood Editions) appeared in 2001 well after 1995. And what a splendid poem-series that is, which would easily seem suitable for inclusion under any, or all, of the section-titles.
14. On a side-note, I discovered one of the most pleasing things from reading the bio-note for Johnson’s literary executor, Peter O’Leary: mention of a forthcoming new edition of Johnson’s postmodern epic poem Ark. Why not a Collected Johnson as well? And/or his prose?
15. O’Leary’s own long poem included here, “The Phosphorescence of Thought” is itself nearly worth the purchase of the book.
16. Ronald Johnson is of course dead. Gustaf Sobin is dead too, but he’s been included.
17. Enough ranting. Have I been ranting?
18. Jack Collom’s and Lyn Heinian’s collaborative collection Situations, Sings was published a few years back by Adventures in Poetry, it’s totally great. “The Woods” appears here grouped under “Textual Ecologies.” Dig these lines:
Suspicion. Sometimes through the unperceived nights that surround all dreams
there emerge
Explanations in the form of spandrels, to read as we read a redstart,
Employment as a nurse, or rolypolies (pillbugs) in the dirt
Tracks which are closer to nature than mind but not as close as insanity,
Healthily entertained. I too have been nuts, loopy, hopeful, ungrammatical and
out of tune.
I think the woods is made of many minor keys. Mornings
Confuse the song so as to continue the lives that dreams criticize
Keeping them from entropy—then all too often being accused of
Existentialism, as if that were the same as despair. …
19. My favorite selections are the longest ones. Such as Brian Teare’s “Transcendental Grammar Crown” a ring of sonnets whose lines are widely spaced which is found grouped under (no surprise) “New Transcendentalisms.” Teare’s poetry keeps what’s precious hanging delicately perched on tips of language’s beauty but rather miraculously avoids inflecting any damage upon itself, despite its risky behavior.
Healthily entertained. I too have been nuts, loopy, hopeful, ungrammatical and
out of tune.
I think the woods is made of many minor keys. Mornings
Confuse the song so as to continue the lives that dreams criticize
Keeping them from entropy—then all too often being accused of
Existentialism, as if that were the same as despair. …
19. My favorite selections are the longest ones. Such as Brian Teare’s “Transcendental Grammar Crown” a ring of sonnets whose lines are widely spaced which is found grouped under (no surprise) “New Transcendentalisms.” Teare’s poetry keeps what’s precious hanging delicately perched on tips of language’s beauty but rather miraculously avoids inflecting any damage upon itself, despite its risky behavior.
to detail starting small with grasses
flowers then trees we don’t know nor rocks
days to recite the names of them all
seems heaven enough to us because what is
language that “categories of thought
embodied in individual living forms” thread through us
& things equally —matter a sidereal charity
& doesn’t it bract doesn’t it sepal & send seed splitting sheath
into soil doesn’t our flesh the very fossils tremble bedrock
(from “The very air (Faith Reason)”)
20. Other notable lengthy poem-sequences, include: Jennifer Moxley’s “The Sense Record,” Peter Gizzi’s “Some values of Landscape and Weather,” Brenda Iijima’s “Panthering,” Will Alexander’s “On Scorpions & Swallows,” Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache,” Amy King’s “A Geography of Pleasure,” and Stephen Collis’ “Blackberries.”flowers then trees we don’t know nor rocks
days to recite the names of them all
seems heaven enough to us because what is
language that “categories of thought
embodied in individual living forms” thread through us
& things equally —matter a sidereal charity
& doesn’t it bract doesn’t it sepal & send seed splitting sheath
into soil doesn’t our flesh the very fossils tremble bedrock
(from “The very air (Faith Reason)”)
21. Again and again, I find myself wondering about the selection process. For example, Standard Shaefer’s sonnet-length “The L.A. River” is here, but none of Lewis MacAdams’ book-length poem The River addressed to the same body of water in the same city and which is just as adventurously on point in terms of fitting in quite nicely as “Necro/pastoral,” or most certainly under “Local Powers.”
22. An obviously incomplete and quite random list of The Arcadia Project’s unrecognized predecessors, progenitors, peers, and life-mates from out my own reading (in no particular order): Lorine Niedecker, Gertrude Stein, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Poe, Charles Brockden Brown (talk about “Necro/Pastoral”! his Wieland introduces Charles Dickens’ spontaneous combustion of a literary character into American Lit), Faulkner, Charles Olson, WCW, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Jack Kerouac, Ed Dorn, Philip Whalen, Lisa Jarnot, Ted Berrigan, Joanne Kyger, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, John Cage, Elaine Equi, Jonathan Williams, Jack Spicer, Anselm Hollo, Hannah Wiener, Filip Marinovich, Susan Howe, Anselm Berrigan, Etel Adnan, Ornette Coleman, Sotére Torregian, John Wieners, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bukowski, John Coletti, Chris Martin, Gerrit Lansing, Gregory Corso, Kevin Opstedal, Brenda Coultas, Eileen Tabios, Micah Ballard, F.A. Nettelbeck, Cedar Sigo, Jack Hirschman, David Brazil, Julian Brolaski… all whose work is deeply at play in any sense of North American Pastoral. There are so many more.
23. C.S. Giscombe’s prose poems “from Inland” earthily dunk the reader in unexpected poetic turns of cultural utterance.
Trim photographs of uninflected speech hung over the prairie, sound’s origin. Eros came up out of its den in the embankment—came out tawny, came out swarthy, came out more “dusky” than “sienna.” The sky was a glass of water. White men say cock and black men say dick. One gets even in the midwest, one gets even in the midwest, one gets even in the midwest. Eros was a common barnyard pest…
(“Day Song”)
&
Open love. In a recurring dream about the prairie, a thin hedge—along some railroad embankment—in which there’s a gap to step through again and again, for me to step through, out onto the view itself. Not the literary ballad, articulated, but out onto the continent.
(“Afro-Prairie”)
24. A sense of “Necro/Pastoral” is well summed up in Catherine Wagner’s “A Form of Verse:”(“Afro-Prairie”)
Master,
make me collage it.
“Recycle language
for a greener consciousness”
—that’s easy.
Everyone’s always done it.
We must be getting greener
by the hour.
…this fecund hint
I merely live in.
Interview: Jasmine Dreame Wagner on Simultaneity and Wrecked Legacies
by G.C. Waldrep
In a poem we didn’t include in the anthology—“V.I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport,” from the current issue of Aufgabe—you quote the Russian Acmeist Kazimir Malevich: “but a surface lives, it has been born.” What is the relation, for you, between poetry and this living surface? Literally or figuratively defined?
Is “the pastoral,” then, a surface? How or why does it come to be “born,” in a poem?
I think of language, literature, and by extension, poetry, as a living and evolving surface, both literally and figuratively. Literally, when the pen transforms the page, something new is born. Reading, too, is a kind of birth. Every word you read wakes in your mind.
Thinking less along the lines of the psychology of perception and more along the lines of cultural production, language is a lot like graffiti on a wall. New tags cover the old. Some tags endure, sprayed in brighter paint, in higher places. Sometimes authorities come and whitewash it all.
Every year, new technologies are born, and with them, new words we use to refer to them. I’m not too apt at guessing people’s ages by their physical characteristics, but if I can speak with a person, I can count on their vocabulary, their points of reference, their cultural capital, to reveal the technology and the dominant moral code of the decade they were born. My grandparents have different words for “sneakers” and “jeans” than I do. My grandparents also have different cuss words and situations where using them would or wouldn’t be appropriate—and so do my students, who can, and do, communicate entirely in truncated texts and compounded punctuation. “YOLO” is as much a creation of their generation as “OK” was creation of my grandparents’.
One thing that truly excites me about the living, evolving surface of contemporary poetry is how we are able to access and watch (and participate!), first-hand, as new words are born. More poets and critics are grappling with our accelerating modes of communication and the accompanying abundance and availability of texts than ever before. The public sphere is dizzy with conversation. How does one even begin to account for, acknowledge, and be influenced by all of the voices?—this is one thing I wonder when I troll the internet.
When I began to get into poetry, like, really get into writing poems and caring about poems, I was stunned by the blog arguments one could follow in real time, especially the arguments that pitted one kind of poetry against another. I wondered how the established, aging, and (comparatively) moneyed generation of poets who came of age writing Romantic-leaning, introspective, narrative confessionals could be so bold as to denounce the aesthetics of both the Language poets that have been tearing up the floorboards for years, and also the New Sincerity, the New Ironic, Alt Lit, the Postmodern Lyric, the anarcho-formalist poets working in erasures and 15-line sonnets, the Flarf Poets, the Cowboy Poets, and also, also, also. One could find an argument for and against every kind of poem, every kind of poet from every demographic. In spite of all of the bickering and the calling of names, in spite of every argument that narrative is fascist, that hifalutin vocabulary is elitist, that “the new sincerity” is actually “the old irony,” in spite of every sigh, cry, or angst-fueled rant that originates out of, about, in, after, or before an MFA workshop (or in spite of one,) in spite of everything, every form exists and is utilized, every tone of voice and timbre of sentiment finds its place in the current climate and it’s big and beautiful and wild.
So why do we attempt to frame and order the wild surface of poetry? Is it because we want to see ourselves as its brave pioneers? Do we want to know where we stand so that we may claim a plot on poetry’s prairie?
Why all the Romantic longing?
When I read the blogs, I wonder why the Romantic idealization, the obsession with framing and wildness? Why do we romanticize a poet’s sexual wildness, her bad-seed animal nature, her dirty mouth, her inability to color within the lines? Why do we romanticize our critical history of Great Men bickering as though they (both the Men and the words) were of divine status? Why do we romanticize our Gatekeepers and the mythic locks and keys they dangle above their articulate array of aesthetic camps and grant categories? With all of the news-blog articles and Twitter feeds decrying the profligate irony of the Millennials, the proliferation of MFA programs, the overabundance of “nice reviews,” it sure seems like our media has a solid, idealized conception of (and an institutionalized nostalgia for) “how good things used to be.”
Our Western world didn’t gleam with the patina of nostalgia until we moved from the fields into the factories. We should know better than to marinate in our yearning for a pure, untouched world that’s essentially a fiction, right? Our cultural memory is a Great American Novel. As poets, we should know this. We read Whitman, we read Wordsworth, we read everything that comes before and everything that follows, so we should understand how we contain both a stalk of grass and a field of daffodils, that we construct our forms as we construct ourselves. We know how memory can “take us back,” but remembering isn’t the same as actually attempting to engineer a time-travel machine, or a utopia modeled on past fashions. Which is what I think a lot of poets writing “pastoral” or “nature poetry” try to do. Time-travel (to relive past glory), or build a retro utopia (of antique speech).
So why do we romanticize a past that wasn’t necessarily any better than the way things are right now? We can’t go back to the pretty sheep-dotted landscape in the painting. We’re too aware of its context: the frame, where the painting is hung on the wall, the way the sunlight has accented the hues of the shadows, the patronizing tilt of the viewer’s gaze. We’re aware of not just the frame and the method and the content and the gaze, but the room, the house, the state, the planet, the universe, the realm of the mind, how we are all connected in the vastly unfolding future that careens like a sports car in a narrative poem that ends ambiguously holy. This is the extravagant, the glorious, the uncomfortable surface of the poetry we live in. It’s wild.
Perhaps it is because the state of poetry today is Pastoral.
(Am I molding the definition to fit my own ecstatic will and biases? Maybe. Mostly, I like to think of poetry as ecstatic compassion at the crossroads of contingency and a brain.)
The most remarkable thing about your poems, it seems to me, is how they register—delimit—claim (even) a particular place or space. They map, and what they map is territory. Could you speak to this question of mapping, of territory? In general? As regards “Champion Mill”?
To continue with what I was saying earlier, whether you are writing or drawing or otherwise documenting, when you put a pen to paper, you create something out of nothing. The page is transformed. It becomes something other, something new. When someone reads what you’ve inscribed, they see and hear the things you’ve described, narrated. They live the narrative, your narrative. Your territory becomes theirs. Text is a vehicle for empathy. The fact that we use symbols, soundlessly, to give our experiences, our visions, life in another person’s body, to relay not just knowledge but the experience of being human, never ceases to amaze me.
When I was a child, I spent hours digging in the dirt. I thought that if I dug deep enough, I’d find arrowheads and diamonds. I remember believing that all dirt, everywhere, contained arrowheads and diamonds. What I pulled up from the ground instead were Coke caps and mica schist. My neighbors thought I was weird because I dug up trash, but the items I found didn’t feel like trash to me. The faded logos of the bottle caps felt as ancient as dinosaur bones. The mica fell apart in my hands, stuck to my knees like glitter. Dirt never felt like dirt to me. It felt like a universe.
When my mother enrolled me in public school, I couldn’t understand my classmates’ disinterest in dirt. They played video games and collected American Dolls and snorted crushed-up fluorescent candy. This is how I feel about writing poems and, to some extent, participating in culture as an artist, a poet, and musician today. I feel like the kid taking pictures of dewdrops on spider webs while the other kids snort candy under the bleachers.
On a more serious note, every day, I step into the world and give it my sustained attention. I don’t think too much about the act of mapping or the idea of territory while I’m writing, but I am very conscious of the sustained attention I give to my surroundings. What I think I’m going to find, arrowheads and diamonds, I never find. What I do find is always unexpected. I never know what’s there until I dig. Sometimes, in my day-to-day life, I feel surrounded by spectacle, suffocated by the flash and sparkle and its demands on my attention and on my pocketbook. That’s one reason why I think I’m drawn to these dilapidated places, places nature is working to reclaim. Capitalism finally gave up on them. They’re quieter than the forest.
I might visit these buildings, these places like the Champion Mill, for the peace and quiet, but I think about them and write about them because I want to understand the culture that created them. The culture that, every day, makes me. Places like the Champion Mill and the V.I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport have much to teach us about being flawed, being human. They linger like scars on appendages and abdomens, suggesting narratives, lessons we should learn or should have learned. These places were designed and built by human hands and they have the unique ability to reveal the desires, bodies, and beliefs of the humans to whom those hands were once attached. They are places where the spiritual history of capitalist America comes in direct contact with the secular history that frames it: here is our belief, our desire, its manifestation, its systems and hierarchies, its witness and its testimony, all at once.
Our wrecked mills and spoiled soils are our legacy. They are “ours,” thus, our territory. They exist on the outskirts of towns. They frame our livable areas. We live and move between them. Or perhaps I should say, they exist between us, because they are in limbo, in purgatory: neither dead nor alive, neither damned nor saved. Not intact, not completely disintegrated. Many of these sites are too toxic to rehabilitate. There’s a building in Waterbury, CT, where the Radium Girls painted watch dials for the Timex Corporation. Years later, the rooms of the warehouse are still radioactive. A developer wanted to renovate the building into low-income housing for the elderly, but local politicians wouldn’t change the radiation threshold of the code that prevents it. Thankfully, in my opinion. It’s cruel to house people in a place that will kill them and call it charity. But every day, industrial sites sit untouched for years until a zoning board changes a chemical toxicity threshold, permitting mixed-use renovation. Progress, or not? How much of a chemical can we take before innocuous becomes poisonous? Where do we draw the line?
The entire existence of these places hinges on the “drawing of lines,” on border-marking and toxicity thresholds, marginal measurements. It’s interesting to think of these places as being both dependent on thresholds and as the physical margins that edge us. It’s a double whammy.
We view them as our frame; they lend us context. When we view them as landscape, we see them as they are, in their decrepit physicality, but we can’t forget what they once were. We can’t forget the idealized America, the old industrial strength, entombed in them. We can’t separate past from present in these places, the way we ache when we touch a scar, even if the wound healed years ago. These places have become a new pastoral, even more so as nature reclaims them. When we view them, when we place our frame of context around them, a frame they, themselves provide, the frame is constructed in real time by whomever has the guildsmen’s privilege to survey and voice their narrative. If these buildings completely decay or are knocked to the ground, the narrative, the voice is gone.
As urban development sprawls outwards from city centers, as exurbs develop into planned communities and public parks that spiral outwards from their gated entrances like spirals of shells, as mixed-use becomes residential, evidence of our former reign as an industrial superpower disintegrates. Buildings like the Champion Mill disappear (at the time of writing this, the Champion Mill is completely gone) and are replaced with picturesque patios and sidewalks and condominium complexes with names like “Sterling Ridge” and “Eden’s Grove.” Some people like the slate wiped clean, and in a way, this rebuilding and renaming (and rebranding) feels a lot like poetry that is written Romantically, in disregard for the way things are right now. There is, in some poetry being written today, a picturesque valorization of nature and the natural-scientific that, when combined with references to mythic figures, Biblical characters, dated speech styles, wistfulness for unrequited love, and introspective narrative, strikes me as strictly Romantic. It’s a kind of poetry that wins prizes, but it’s philosophically irresponsible.
I think that what people forget most when thinking about nature poetry and landscape painting or any form of representational art is that the world doesn’t exist for us to exploit it. And just as we can’t go back to seeing only the painting’s content, as we can never return to just seeing. All experience is mediated. There is no human expression, not even a handshake, that isn’t tainted by capitalism. There is no wilderness that hasn’t been mapped by satellite. The only way we can truly explore is to press our boundaries deeper into space and deeper into our bodies and minds, and here is where we find the most legislation, limits imposed by cost and ethics and media and the power of the powers-that-be. (Few can afford to build their own space program, and fewer can press the ethical limits of bioengineering and the psychology of advertising and mass marketing. All progress in these uncharted areas is mandated, corporate.)
Also, I can’t really talk about marginalized experience and place without talking about the marginalization of the female voice. As a writer and as a feminist, I follow VIDA and am disappointed by the gender breakdown every time a new count surfaces. There are times in my life where I have been silenced by authority, and I am sure that the silencing had to do with my gender and class. I’m grateful for the rising interest in female narratives, girlish voices, and the aesthetic of the “Gurlesque.” However, it seems as though everywhere a female writer is being championed, she is young and sexy and her voice rings out of sex and anger and violence. These are the voices that are being widely published and discussed, heard and reviewed. Which is a good thing, because women speaking in certain tones of voice or on certain topics have been silenced for too long. However, (and it seems there is always a “however,”) I am concerned with the spectacle (spectre, should I say) that haunts these discussions. Are we actually giving voice to voices that have been silenced? Or are we allowing our media to exploit women’s bodies and hurts just to keep the machine oiled?
As a woman and as a poet who feels drawn to write about place and landscape, the world of things, rather than my romantic history, I can’t help but worry. In our confessional culture, it seems démodé to keep something for oneself. By meditating on marginalized places, on desire as arc of land instead of arc of flesh, am I further marginalizing myself and my writing? Would people be more likely to lend me legitimacy as a radical, a feminist, if I were to write about sex instead of buildings? When we say “edgy,” we mean, “of the edge.” All that is truly experimental must exist in the margins. Then why does it seem like the body, fashion, and relationships—all popular topics—are the only legitimate feminist literary subjects? Is the idealized female body an Arcadia in itself?
Sometimes I think that the most radical thing you can do is water a wildflower when no one is looking.
I have to admit that I’ve lingered a long time, in thoughtful bewilderment, between the title of “Champion Mill” and its epigraph: “variations on a field, Missoula, MT.” Coming from North Carolina, I find it hard to think of “Champion Mill” is anything other than an industrial behemoth (in particular, the paper mill at Canton, N.C.). I often find myself drawn to the conceptual spaces between titles and poems, or (in this case) between titles and epigraphs—it’s a sort of wilderness within the poem, an unacknowledged space in which both poem and reader perform various works. How do you move between title, epigraph, and poem? In this poem, or more generally?
When I think of the word “epigraph” my mind moves instinctually to the word “epitaph,” which is why I rarely use epigraphs. I don’t want to think of a sub-header as something that lays a poem to rest. I don’t want to think of a poem as something that lays the world to rest, either.
That said, my use of epigraph in “Champion Mill” was intuitive, not entirely logical. The original title for “Champion Mill” was actually “Variations on a Field.” I chose to use the place’s name for a few reasons, but mostly because I felt it deserved to be known by its name. It deserved my respect.
The poem, or more specifically, the sonnet sequence that composes its backbone, is a series of variations on a theme. One day, I went for a walk by the Clark Fork river, took a detour, and the Champion Mill is where I ended up. I felt at home there, so I visited daily throughout my time in graduate school. At the time, I was thinking I would write poems as though I were painting en plein air. I was also thinking that I wanted to write a poem that felt like Bach’s “Fugue in A Minor,” which is how seeing this building and the field that surrounded it felt. I wanted to express the density of the structure, its repetitive ornamentation, its sadness, hauntedness, otherworldliness. How each mill building was an individual unit, but the fallen beams, tumbleweeds, barb wire and debris unified the sight lines.
Intuitively, it didn’t seem right to keep the original title, “Variations.” I felt as though the emphasis on variety would lead the reader to experience each “field” too discretely. Like a string of days or memories in lieu of a life. While I did want the poem to be read, comprehended, and perceived visually as a discrete series, I wanted to emphasize their unity.
There are also a few thoughts in here on the sonnet as a machine, the poem as a machine, using verse form as a generator, the Champion Mill as my sonnet factory, all product from a singular factory as a unified whole, like a barge full of rubber duckies, but that’s a whole other question.
The Champion Mill, the field in its gut. One day, there was a baseball game at the neighboring diamond. One day, it snowed. One day, I walked the river with a friend. When I began to draft the poem on my computer, all the days and thoughts I’d scrawled in my notebook seemed to flow from end to end. They all happened at once, all the little histories.
Is “the pastoral,” then, a surface? How or why does it come to be “born,” in a poem?
I think of language, literature, and by extension, poetry, as a living and evolving surface, both literally and figuratively. Literally, when the pen transforms the page, something new is born. Reading, too, is a kind of birth. Every word you read wakes in your mind.
Thinking less along the lines of the psychology of perception and more along the lines of cultural production, language is a lot like graffiti on a wall. New tags cover the old. Some tags endure, sprayed in brighter paint, in higher places. Sometimes authorities come and whitewash it all.
Every year, new technologies are born, and with them, new words we use to refer to them. I’m not too apt at guessing people’s ages by their physical characteristics, but if I can speak with a person, I can count on their vocabulary, their points of reference, their cultural capital, to reveal the technology and the dominant moral code of the decade they were born. My grandparents have different words for “sneakers” and “jeans” than I do. My grandparents also have different cuss words and situations where using them would or wouldn’t be appropriate—and so do my students, who can, and do, communicate entirely in truncated texts and compounded punctuation. “YOLO” is as much a creation of their generation as “OK” was creation of my grandparents’.
One thing that truly excites me about the living, evolving surface of contemporary poetry is how we are able to access and watch (and participate!), first-hand, as new words are born. More poets and critics are grappling with our accelerating modes of communication and the accompanying abundance and availability of texts than ever before. The public sphere is dizzy with conversation. How does one even begin to account for, acknowledge, and be influenced by all of the voices?—this is one thing I wonder when I troll the internet.
When I began to get into poetry, like, really get into writing poems and caring about poems, I was stunned by the blog arguments one could follow in real time, especially the arguments that pitted one kind of poetry against another. I wondered how the established, aging, and (comparatively) moneyed generation of poets who came of age writing Romantic-leaning, introspective, narrative confessionals could be so bold as to denounce the aesthetics of both the Language poets that have been tearing up the floorboards for years, and also the New Sincerity, the New Ironic, Alt Lit, the Postmodern Lyric, the anarcho-formalist poets working in erasures and 15-line sonnets, the Flarf Poets, the Cowboy Poets, and also, also, also. One could find an argument for and against every kind of poem, every kind of poet from every demographic. In spite of all of the bickering and the calling of names, in spite of every argument that narrative is fascist, that hifalutin vocabulary is elitist, that “the new sincerity” is actually “the old irony,” in spite of every sigh, cry, or angst-fueled rant that originates out of, about, in, after, or before an MFA workshop (or in spite of one,) in spite of everything, every form exists and is utilized, every tone of voice and timbre of sentiment finds its place in the current climate and it’s big and beautiful and wild.
So why do we attempt to frame and order the wild surface of poetry? Is it because we want to see ourselves as its brave pioneers? Do we want to know where we stand so that we may claim a plot on poetry’s prairie?
Why all the Romantic longing?
When I read the blogs, I wonder why the Romantic idealization, the obsession with framing and wildness? Why do we romanticize a poet’s sexual wildness, her bad-seed animal nature, her dirty mouth, her inability to color within the lines? Why do we romanticize our critical history of Great Men bickering as though they (both the Men and the words) were of divine status? Why do we romanticize our Gatekeepers and the mythic locks and keys they dangle above their articulate array of aesthetic camps and grant categories? With all of the news-blog articles and Twitter feeds decrying the profligate irony of the Millennials, the proliferation of MFA programs, the overabundance of “nice reviews,” it sure seems like our media has a solid, idealized conception of (and an institutionalized nostalgia for) “how good things used to be.”
Our Western world didn’t gleam with the patina of nostalgia until we moved from the fields into the factories. We should know better than to marinate in our yearning for a pure, untouched world that’s essentially a fiction, right? Our cultural memory is a Great American Novel. As poets, we should know this. We read Whitman, we read Wordsworth, we read everything that comes before and everything that follows, so we should understand how we contain both a stalk of grass and a field of daffodils, that we construct our forms as we construct ourselves. We know how memory can “take us back,” but remembering isn’t the same as actually attempting to engineer a time-travel machine, or a utopia modeled on past fashions. Which is what I think a lot of poets writing “pastoral” or “nature poetry” try to do. Time-travel (to relive past glory), or build a retro utopia (of antique speech).
So why do we romanticize a past that wasn’t necessarily any better than the way things are right now? We can’t go back to the pretty sheep-dotted landscape in the painting. We’re too aware of its context: the frame, where the painting is hung on the wall, the way the sunlight has accented the hues of the shadows, the patronizing tilt of the viewer’s gaze. We’re aware of not just the frame and the method and the content and the gaze, but the room, the house, the state, the planet, the universe, the realm of the mind, how we are all connected in the vastly unfolding future that careens like a sports car in a narrative poem that ends ambiguously holy. This is the extravagant, the glorious, the uncomfortable surface of the poetry we live in. It’s wild.
Perhaps it is because the state of poetry today is Pastoral.
(Am I molding the definition to fit my own ecstatic will and biases? Maybe. Mostly, I like to think of poetry as ecstatic compassion at the crossroads of contingency and a brain.)
The most remarkable thing about your poems, it seems to me, is how they register—delimit—claim (even) a particular place or space. They map, and what they map is territory. Could you speak to this question of mapping, of territory? In general? As regards “Champion Mill”?
To continue with what I was saying earlier, whether you are writing or drawing or otherwise documenting, when you put a pen to paper, you create something out of nothing. The page is transformed. It becomes something other, something new. When someone reads what you’ve inscribed, they see and hear the things you’ve described, narrated. They live the narrative, your narrative. Your territory becomes theirs. Text is a vehicle for empathy. The fact that we use symbols, soundlessly, to give our experiences, our visions, life in another person’s body, to relay not just knowledge but the experience of being human, never ceases to amaze me.
When I was a child, I spent hours digging in the dirt. I thought that if I dug deep enough, I’d find arrowheads and diamonds. I remember believing that all dirt, everywhere, contained arrowheads and diamonds. What I pulled up from the ground instead were Coke caps and mica schist. My neighbors thought I was weird because I dug up trash, but the items I found didn’t feel like trash to me. The faded logos of the bottle caps felt as ancient as dinosaur bones. The mica fell apart in my hands, stuck to my knees like glitter. Dirt never felt like dirt to me. It felt like a universe.
When my mother enrolled me in public school, I couldn’t understand my classmates’ disinterest in dirt. They played video games and collected American Dolls and snorted crushed-up fluorescent candy. This is how I feel about writing poems and, to some extent, participating in culture as an artist, a poet, and musician today. I feel like the kid taking pictures of dewdrops on spider webs while the other kids snort candy under the bleachers.
On a more serious note, every day, I step into the world and give it my sustained attention. I don’t think too much about the act of mapping or the idea of territory while I’m writing, but I am very conscious of the sustained attention I give to my surroundings. What I think I’m going to find, arrowheads and diamonds, I never find. What I do find is always unexpected. I never know what’s there until I dig. Sometimes, in my day-to-day life, I feel surrounded by spectacle, suffocated by the flash and sparkle and its demands on my attention and on my pocketbook. That’s one reason why I think I’m drawn to these dilapidated places, places nature is working to reclaim. Capitalism finally gave up on them. They’re quieter than the forest.
I might visit these buildings, these places like the Champion Mill, for the peace and quiet, but I think about them and write about them because I want to understand the culture that created them. The culture that, every day, makes me. Places like the Champion Mill and the V.I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport have much to teach us about being flawed, being human. They linger like scars on appendages and abdomens, suggesting narratives, lessons we should learn or should have learned. These places were designed and built by human hands and they have the unique ability to reveal the desires, bodies, and beliefs of the humans to whom those hands were once attached. They are places where the spiritual history of capitalist America comes in direct contact with the secular history that frames it: here is our belief, our desire, its manifestation, its systems and hierarchies, its witness and its testimony, all at once.
Our wrecked mills and spoiled soils are our legacy. They are “ours,” thus, our territory. They exist on the outskirts of towns. They frame our livable areas. We live and move between them. Or perhaps I should say, they exist between us, because they are in limbo, in purgatory: neither dead nor alive, neither damned nor saved. Not intact, not completely disintegrated. Many of these sites are too toxic to rehabilitate. There’s a building in Waterbury, CT, where the Radium Girls painted watch dials for the Timex Corporation. Years later, the rooms of the warehouse are still radioactive. A developer wanted to renovate the building into low-income housing for the elderly, but local politicians wouldn’t change the radiation threshold of the code that prevents it. Thankfully, in my opinion. It’s cruel to house people in a place that will kill them and call it charity. But every day, industrial sites sit untouched for years until a zoning board changes a chemical toxicity threshold, permitting mixed-use renovation. Progress, or not? How much of a chemical can we take before innocuous becomes poisonous? Where do we draw the line?
The entire existence of these places hinges on the “drawing of lines,” on border-marking and toxicity thresholds, marginal measurements. It’s interesting to think of these places as being both dependent on thresholds and as the physical margins that edge us. It’s a double whammy.
We view them as our frame; they lend us context. When we view them as landscape, we see them as they are, in their decrepit physicality, but we can’t forget what they once were. We can’t forget the idealized America, the old industrial strength, entombed in them. We can’t separate past from present in these places, the way we ache when we touch a scar, even if the wound healed years ago. These places have become a new pastoral, even more so as nature reclaims them. When we view them, when we place our frame of context around them, a frame they, themselves provide, the frame is constructed in real time by whomever has the guildsmen’s privilege to survey and voice their narrative. If these buildings completely decay or are knocked to the ground, the narrative, the voice is gone.
As urban development sprawls outwards from city centers, as exurbs develop into planned communities and public parks that spiral outwards from their gated entrances like spirals of shells, as mixed-use becomes residential, evidence of our former reign as an industrial superpower disintegrates. Buildings like the Champion Mill disappear (at the time of writing this, the Champion Mill is completely gone) and are replaced with picturesque patios and sidewalks and condominium complexes with names like “Sterling Ridge” and “Eden’s Grove.” Some people like the slate wiped clean, and in a way, this rebuilding and renaming (and rebranding) feels a lot like poetry that is written Romantically, in disregard for the way things are right now. There is, in some poetry being written today, a picturesque valorization of nature and the natural-scientific that, when combined with references to mythic figures, Biblical characters, dated speech styles, wistfulness for unrequited love, and introspective narrative, strikes me as strictly Romantic. It’s a kind of poetry that wins prizes, but it’s philosophically irresponsible.
I think that what people forget most when thinking about nature poetry and landscape painting or any form of representational art is that the world doesn’t exist for us to exploit it. And just as we can’t go back to seeing only the painting’s content, as we can never return to just seeing. All experience is mediated. There is no human expression, not even a handshake, that isn’t tainted by capitalism. There is no wilderness that hasn’t been mapped by satellite. The only way we can truly explore is to press our boundaries deeper into space and deeper into our bodies and minds, and here is where we find the most legislation, limits imposed by cost and ethics and media and the power of the powers-that-be. (Few can afford to build their own space program, and fewer can press the ethical limits of bioengineering and the psychology of advertising and mass marketing. All progress in these uncharted areas is mandated, corporate.)
Also, I can’t really talk about marginalized experience and place without talking about the marginalization of the female voice. As a writer and as a feminist, I follow VIDA and am disappointed by the gender breakdown every time a new count surfaces. There are times in my life where I have been silenced by authority, and I am sure that the silencing had to do with my gender and class. I’m grateful for the rising interest in female narratives, girlish voices, and the aesthetic of the “Gurlesque.” However, it seems as though everywhere a female writer is being championed, she is young and sexy and her voice rings out of sex and anger and violence. These are the voices that are being widely published and discussed, heard and reviewed. Which is a good thing, because women speaking in certain tones of voice or on certain topics have been silenced for too long. However, (and it seems there is always a “however,”) I am concerned with the spectacle (spectre, should I say) that haunts these discussions. Are we actually giving voice to voices that have been silenced? Or are we allowing our media to exploit women’s bodies and hurts just to keep the machine oiled?
As a woman and as a poet who feels drawn to write about place and landscape, the world of things, rather than my romantic history, I can’t help but worry. In our confessional culture, it seems démodé to keep something for oneself. By meditating on marginalized places, on desire as arc of land instead of arc of flesh, am I further marginalizing myself and my writing? Would people be more likely to lend me legitimacy as a radical, a feminist, if I were to write about sex instead of buildings? When we say “edgy,” we mean, “of the edge.” All that is truly experimental must exist in the margins. Then why does it seem like the body, fashion, and relationships—all popular topics—are the only legitimate feminist literary subjects? Is the idealized female body an Arcadia in itself?
Sometimes I think that the most radical thing you can do is water a wildflower when no one is looking.
I have to admit that I’ve lingered a long time, in thoughtful bewilderment, between the title of “Champion Mill” and its epigraph: “variations on a field, Missoula, MT.” Coming from North Carolina, I find it hard to think of “Champion Mill” is anything other than an industrial behemoth (in particular, the paper mill at Canton, N.C.). I often find myself drawn to the conceptual spaces between titles and poems, or (in this case) between titles and epigraphs—it’s a sort of wilderness within the poem, an unacknowledged space in which both poem and reader perform various works. How do you move between title, epigraph, and poem? In this poem, or more generally?
When I think of the word “epigraph” my mind moves instinctually to the word “epitaph,” which is why I rarely use epigraphs. I don’t want to think of a sub-header as something that lays a poem to rest. I don’t want to think of a poem as something that lays the world to rest, either.
That said, my use of epigraph in “Champion Mill” was intuitive, not entirely logical. The original title for “Champion Mill” was actually “Variations on a Field.” I chose to use the place’s name for a few reasons, but mostly because I felt it deserved to be known by its name. It deserved my respect.
The poem, or more specifically, the sonnet sequence that composes its backbone, is a series of variations on a theme. One day, I went for a walk by the Clark Fork river, took a detour, and the Champion Mill is where I ended up. I felt at home there, so I visited daily throughout my time in graduate school. At the time, I was thinking I would write poems as though I were painting en plein air. I was also thinking that I wanted to write a poem that felt like Bach’s “Fugue in A Minor,” which is how seeing this building and the field that surrounded it felt. I wanted to express the density of the structure, its repetitive ornamentation, its sadness, hauntedness, otherworldliness. How each mill building was an individual unit, but the fallen beams, tumbleweeds, barb wire and debris unified the sight lines.
Intuitively, it didn’t seem right to keep the original title, “Variations.” I felt as though the emphasis on variety would lead the reader to experience each “field” too discretely. Like a string of days or memories in lieu of a life. While I did want the poem to be read, comprehended, and perceived visually as a discrete series, I wanted to emphasize their unity.
There are also a few thoughts in here on the sonnet as a machine, the poem as a machine, using verse form as a generator, the Champion Mill as my sonnet factory, all product from a singular factory as a unified whole, like a barge full of rubber duckies, but that’s a whole other question.
The Champion Mill, the field in its gut. One day, there was a baseball game at the neighboring diamond. One day, it snowed. One day, I walked the river with a friend. When I began to draft the poem on my computer, all the days and thoughts I’d scrawled in my notebook seemed to flow from end to end. They all happened at once, all the little histories.
Interview: Dan Beachy-Quick on Keats, the Agonal, and the Sublime
by G.C. Waldrep
Periodically we’ll be posting short interviews with our contributors here, for your delectation. Here’s the first, from Dan Beachy-Quick:
In your essay “The Hut of Poetry”–in your marvelous recent collection from Milkweed, Wonderful Investigation–you write “It helps, perhaps, to think of the poem not as content but as cavern,” as an invitation to entry rather than, perhaps understanding or recorded experience as such. Could you talk a little bit more about this, in terms of both poetic and ecological practice?
I suppose, over the past many years, my sense of a poem’s relation to meaning has gone through a kind of seismic upheaval. I began to distrust my furious instinct toward finding “meaning” in a poem when I began to sense my fury was the very thing forging that meaning–or was so in significant enough ways that I feared the “meaning” I came to merely reified some structure of self that needed to be shaken apart. I should say that I am one who thinks that a poem is involved in the work of meaning-making as a fundamental activity, and that is both one of the reasons I love it, and why I practice it. I also feel as if language creates in the mind an allergic reaction, so to speak, and the reach after “meaning” as such is a kind of congestion. One of the deepest works in poetry, I mean, one of the deepest works poetry offers, is to not only use language in ways that leap beyond the arrival at a so-called meaning, but is to find oneself put to use by the language one uses. In a very odd way, I’ve come to think of the poet as something akin to the Higgs-Boson particle. That is, the poet is a kind of field into which a syllable enters, a word enters, and it gains the mass it needs to become a poem on a page—a thing that is, in curious ways, the spurious phenomenon of a world itself. Much influenced by Lyn Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness,” I began to conceive of a poem’s language as a description, miraculously a map that leads into itself, into the world that it is. Meaning then is not where one arrives, but is itself the means of arrival, and where one arrives, what one enters, is the world that is a poem. In terms of poetic practice, this means the work of writing a poem is always tending to the world it forges in ways that care most deeply for it, to put in it, as Keats would have it, a “fine excess.” In terms of ecological practice, it is one that understands that if the poem is a place of dwelling, one does not get to stay in it—it is in motion, and you yourself are in motion in it, and one is cast out, as is the case with every paradise—it is most ours when we lose it. But that loss casts us back into this world that is, and it casts us into it with an eye that has been initiated into care.
You also mention, several times, your concept of “bewilderment,” a word we thought of often as we were putting together The Arcadia Project: an introjection of wild(er)ness. For you, “bewilderment” seems to be intrinsically bound up in another concept, “initiation.” But for others, it’s more closely related to what one might refer to as estrangement–the opposite of initiation. What is the link between true poetic bewilderment and initiation, and how does estrangement (in any sense of that word) fit into the equation?
I think it’s good to note that the process of initiation–in terms of archaic practices–is one of deep, earth-shattering strangeness. It bewilders the initiate into a death that reverses itself back into life, a practice that is meant to open the eyes as if newly, as if for the first time, so that what light pours into the eye is a deeply strange light, a result of estrangement. The poems I love, and the poems I would most dearly want to write, offer us recognition with a flaw, and that flaw is the first hint that the senses must suffer a bewilderment to perceive this world right, and those estranged perceptions must be the roots of these thoughts that think their way into and through this world. Part of my sense of initiatory bewilderment as a gift the poem offers, difficult as it may be, is that it forces the mind back into the body as the source of its ideational work. Then thinking grows apprehensive, and is a grasping thing. It is by finding that place where the mind is such, beginning at the point of estrangement, that a poem can be, perhaps must be, written. It just so happens, awfully and wonderfully enough, that the only way that does happen is through the writing of the poem.
And what if I add the ancient concept of “the sublime,” as a fourth concept for you to juggle— that peculiar combination of beauty and terror? How does it alter the rhythm of the whole, or does something else have to drop?
I do find there is a terror in beauty, a kind of erotic fascination the mind is helpless not to consider, not that this considering it nears it, not that it resolves it or solves it. I suppose I do seek, as devotedly as I can, that moment at which the mind is undone by the thing it discloses–that point of apprehension in every sense, where to grasp so as to understand is also to fear the thing encountered. In some ways, I don’t know if it alters the rhythm of the whole so much as I feel the rhythm of the whole alters you, me, the reader, the writer. Part of beauty’s real terror, I think, is it claims you into it, calls you into it, an erotic magnet, the “loadstone concatenation” (Keats), whose fee for entry is the loss of the definite self one had been before the experience of the poem. I think the sublime is also that sort of experience resistant to becoming mere experience, the place where the fact grows adhesive, and pulls to it all that cannot help but be attracted to its tow.
As I read your work and meditate on what are, for me, the almost unfathomable connections with the Romantics (Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley), I’m struck with what this connection produces: a sustained capacity for wonder. You address this briefly in the preface to Wonderful Investigations, but what I am wondering now: is there such a thing as an agonal wonder?
It’s funny you’d ask this now, as I just finished a short book on Keats, the main discovery of which was the degree to which wonder is agonal. I do feel very concerned with the need to maintain a capacity for wonder–really, for all the reasons spoken of above. Maybe I want to revise what I just said, not that “wonder is agonal,” but that wonder accompanies agonistic endeavor, runs parallel to it, and in the midst of agony wonder interrupts, alters difficulty into altar. This typifies Keats’s work, I think. Agony in its oldest sense becomes deeply important–the agon not only as wrestling ground, but the agon as descriptive of the process by which anything comes into being, a gathering toward existence that precedes existence, as true for us as it is for the gods, as true for the poem as it is for us. This grappling with other in agony strikes me as one way to define what the poem on the page offers—it is agony’s blank ground. What results, as with Keats, is that excessive world that is the poem, and wonder is exactly that this world has come to be, agony’s product and agony’s promise.
And where and how does Celan fit into this?
When I first read this question, I didn’t know how to answer, especially when I tried to tie it back into the ecological efforts of this anthology. Celan is for me one the central poets. I’ve never recovered from reading his work for the first time, a wound that deepens with every return. I suppose my answer is that Celan is at the very source for me of this thinking, of this worlding of the poem in wonder and agony. Celan’s belief that the poem is in search of an other who exists, one who is, as he is, stricken by the reality he strives after. It is also deeply there in his Bremen address, his link between “thinking” and “thanking.” Celan’s poems offer constant reminder that the poem is not the thing a poet is trying to accomplish. The poem itself is searching, a world in search of a person who can enter it, opening within itself the grounds for encounter, in which we can take solace in Emerson’s “It is very sad, but too late to be helped, this discovery we have made, that we exist.” Is it too much to say I think we make this discovery in the poem, and that the poem is a grounds for existence? Well, I do. Celan, I know, did—and for his thinking I am deeply thankful, and called into the responsibility to think also myself.
In your essay “The Hut of Poetry”–in your marvelous recent collection from Milkweed, Wonderful Investigation–you write “It helps, perhaps, to think of the poem not as content but as cavern,” as an invitation to entry rather than, perhaps understanding or recorded experience as such. Could you talk a little bit more about this, in terms of both poetic and ecological practice?
I suppose, over the past many years, my sense of a poem’s relation to meaning has gone through a kind of seismic upheaval. I began to distrust my furious instinct toward finding “meaning” in a poem when I began to sense my fury was the very thing forging that meaning–or was so in significant enough ways that I feared the “meaning” I came to merely reified some structure of self that needed to be shaken apart. I should say that I am one who thinks that a poem is involved in the work of meaning-making as a fundamental activity, and that is both one of the reasons I love it, and why I practice it. I also feel as if language creates in the mind an allergic reaction, so to speak, and the reach after “meaning” as such is a kind of congestion. One of the deepest works in poetry, I mean, one of the deepest works poetry offers, is to not only use language in ways that leap beyond the arrival at a so-called meaning, but is to find oneself put to use by the language one uses. In a very odd way, I’ve come to think of the poet as something akin to the Higgs-Boson particle. That is, the poet is a kind of field into which a syllable enters, a word enters, and it gains the mass it needs to become a poem on a page—a thing that is, in curious ways, the spurious phenomenon of a world itself. Much influenced by Lyn Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness,” I began to conceive of a poem’s language as a description, miraculously a map that leads into itself, into the world that it is. Meaning then is not where one arrives, but is itself the means of arrival, and where one arrives, what one enters, is the world that is a poem. In terms of poetic practice, this means the work of writing a poem is always tending to the world it forges in ways that care most deeply for it, to put in it, as Keats would have it, a “fine excess.” In terms of ecological practice, it is one that understands that if the poem is a place of dwelling, one does not get to stay in it—it is in motion, and you yourself are in motion in it, and one is cast out, as is the case with every paradise—it is most ours when we lose it. But that loss casts us back into this world that is, and it casts us into it with an eye that has been initiated into care.
You also mention, several times, your concept of “bewilderment,” a word we thought of often as we were putting together The Arcadia Project: an introjection of wild(er)ness. For you, “bewilderment” seems to be intrinsically bound up in another concept, “initiation.” But for others, it’s more closely related to what one might refer to as estrangement–the opposite of initiation. What is the link between true poetic bewilderment and initiation, and how does estrangement (in any sense of that word) fit into the equation?
I think it’s good to note that the process of initiation–in terms of archaic practices–is one of deep, earth-shattering strangeness. It bewilders the initiate into a death that reverses itself back into life, a practice that is meant to open the eyes as if newly, as if for the first time, so that what light pours into the eye is a deeply strange light, a result of estrangement. The poems I love, and the poems I would most dearly want to write, offer us recognition with a flaw, and that flaw is the first hint that the senses must suffer a bewilderment to perceive this world right, and those estranged perceptions must be the roots of these thoughts that think their way into and through this world. Part of my sense of initiatory bewilderment as a gift the poem offers, difficult as it may be, is that it forces the mind back into the body as the source of its ideational work. Then thinking grows apprehensive, and is a grasping thing. It is by finding that place where the mind is such, beginning at the point of estrangement, that a poem can be, perhaps must be, written. It just so happens, awfully and wonderfully enough, that the only way that does happen is through the writing of the poem.
And what if I add the ancient concept of “the sublime,” as a fourth concept for you to juggle— that peculiar combination of beauty and terror? How does it alter the rhythm of the whole, or does something else have to drop?
I do find there is a terror in beauty, a kind of erotic fascination the mind is helpless not to consider, not that this considering it nears it, not that it resolves it or solves it. I suppose I do seek, as devotedly as I can, that moment at which the mind is undone by the thing it discloses–that point of apprehension in every sense, where to grasp so as to understand is also to fear the thing encountered. In some ways, I don’t know if it alters the rhythm of the whole so much as I feel the rhythm of the whole alters you, me, the reader, the writer. Part of beauty’s real terror, I think, is it claims you into it, calls you into it, an erotic magnet, the “loadstone concatenation” (Keats), whose fee for entry is the loss of the definite self one had been before the experience of the poem. I think the sublime is also that sort of experience resistant to becoming mere experience, the place where the fact grows adhesive, and pulls to it all that cannot help but be attracted to its tow.
As I read your work and meditate on what are, for me, the almost unfathomable connections with the Romantics (Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley), I’m struck with what this connection produces: a sustained capacity for wonder. You address this briefly in the preface to Wonderful Investigations, but what I am wondering now: is there such a thing as an agonal wonder?
It’s funny you’d ask this now, as I just finished a short book on Keats, the main discovery of which was the degree to which wonder is agonal. I do feel very concerned with the need to maintain a capacity for wonder–really, for all the reasons spoken of above. Maybe I want to revise what I just said, not that “wonder is agonal,” but that wonder accompanies agonistic endeavor, runs parallel to it, and in the midst of agony wonder interrupts, alters difficulty into altar. This typifies Keats’s work, I think. Agony in its oldest sense becomes deeply important–the agon not only as wrestling ground, but the agon as descriptive of the process by which anything comes into being, a gathering toward existence that precedes existence, as true for us as it is for the gods, as true for the poem as it is for us. This grappling with other in agony strikes me as one way to define what the poem on the page offers—it is agony’s blank ground. What results, as with Keats, is that excessive world that is the poem, and wonder is exactly that this world has come to be, agony’s product and agony’s promise.
And where and how does Celan fit into this?
When I first read this question, I didn’t know how to answer, especially when I tried to tie it back into the ecological efforts of this anthology. Celan is for me one the central poets. I’ve never recovered from reading his work for the first time, a wound that deepens with every return. I suppose my answer is that Celan is at the very source for me of this thinking, of this worlding of the poem in wonder and agony. Celan’s belief that the poem is in search of an other who exists, one who is, as he is, stricken by the reality he strives after. It is also deeply there in his Bremen address, his link between “thinking” and “thanking.” Celan’s poems offer constant reminder that the poem is not the thing a poet is trying to accomplish. The poem itself is searching, a world in search of a person who can enter it, opening within itself the grounds for encounter, in which we can take solace in Emerson’s “It is very sad, but too late to be helped, this discovery we have made, that we exist.” Is it too much to say I think we make this discovery in the poem, and that the poem is a grounds for existence? Well, I do. Celan, I know, did—and for his thinking I am deeply thankful, and called into the responsibility to think also myself.
THE WOODS, THE TECHNOLOGY
by G.C. Waldrep
Heather Christle
This tree has a small LED display
It is glowing and it can show you words
and it can show you pictures and it can melt
from one choice to another and you are looking at it
and it wants you to share the message
but it can’t see that you are the only one around
and that everyone else is hibernating
which you love You are so happy and alone
with the red and yellow lights It’s a nice day
to be in nature and to read up on the very bland ideas
this tree has about how to live This tree says
grow stronger and this tree says fireworks effect
This tree is the saddest prophet in history
but you don’t tell it that You are trying to show it respect
which gets tiresome but then it flashes
a snake at you It’s a kind of LED tree hybrid joke
and you could just kiss it for trying For failing
But it can’t see you and it starts to cry
.
(from What Is Amazing [Wesleyan University Press, 2012])
My involvement in The Arcadia Project began in the immediate wake of Josh’s AWP panel on ecopoetics in 2007. Why, I wondered, wasn’t there an anthology that simultaneously explored our ecological predicament and formal innovation in verse? Why did those of us who cared, and wrote, into and about the environment in innovative forms have to keep explaining our practice to those who insisted that “nature poetry” honor its Romantic inheritances? What indeed is “nature poetry,” or could it be, or should it be, in our collective moment?
You all know the joke. “Three poets walk into a forest….”
The thing is, the forest does have a technology, in the sense of naturally evolving structure, pattern, form: even in the sense of a human intentionality, a shaping hand, given that what most North Americans know as “forest” is a more or less remarkable patch of treegrowth left behind by human calculation or allowed to grow again in the wake of our species’ prior decimation and harvest of old-growth wood. The forest becomes intentional when we prompt it, when we frame it. In this, it is not unlike the poem. How and what do we read, when we are inside the forest?
(Of course we are always, to some degree, inside the forest.)
Dear Keats, dear Shelley, avian life is imitating our cell phones and our car alarms. When we walk into the forest, we hear our own toys signaling madly back to us.
And it is beautiful, we tell ourselves, and one another. Isn’t it beautiful?
The problem with the forest, in Heather Christle’s formulation, is that while it can think, and want, and feel, it cannot see. The problem with the human is that it can think, and want, and feel, and see, but it cannot choose, or not effectively.
And so we are alone together, in our discrete alonenesses, trying to read one another, to show one another something, to—as Christle slyly puts it (since it is such an exquisitely human notion)—“show [some] respect.”
One could say the joke about the snake has been around a long, long time.
Between 2008 and 2011 Josh and I sifted through hundreds of books—published since 1995 by North American writers, generously defined—as well as hundreds of submissions that came in over our electronic transom, looking for work that would guide us into the forest and try to show us something: work that would leave us alone together (in or in spite of our discrete alonenesses); work that challenged us and terrified us and moved us, that spoke to or around or from within our ecological predicament as 21st-century human creatures.
The resulting anthology is not meant to be definitive, rather provocative and generative, an early draft version of an ongoing conversation between a wide array of poets and the world we live in.
As C. D. Wright reminds us, “It is poetry that remarks on the barely perceptible disappearances from our world….And poetry that notes the barely perceptible appearances.” When I think of Christle’s cyborg-tree as “the saddest prophet in history,” I can’t help but re-imagine the poet’s role, the poem’s 21st-century office. One hopes that new structures, new forms (which poetry can provide) will enable new ways of thinking and doing, new ways of conceptualizing self-in-landscape. To the extent that a 21st-century Western poet has any prophetic office at all, it may lie precisely in anticipating such structures and forms.
Wright adds, “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”
When a friend of mine asked me, two years ago, why I was lavishing so much time on this project—“it’s just an editing project,” he kept insisting, or complaining—I responded, “Because there is the forest—there it is!—and because I am going to die.”
It is perhaps just a little bit beautiful. Isn’t it? For a little while.
***
Josh and I, together with our incredible publisher, Janet Holmes, hope that the conversation represented by the print anthology can continue and expand here, in these virtual pages. We’re happy to receive feedback about the anthology, as well as news (of publications, panels, insurrections) relating to the complex intersection of ecology, the pastoral, and poetic form. (You may also reach us, back-channel, at postmodernpastoral@gmail.com.)In addition, we’ll be posting short interviews with poets from the anthology in the weeks and months ahead. One of the most distinct pleasures of having undertaken this project—a pleasure otherwise hidden from readers of the print anthology—was the wide array of exchanges we had with our contributors concerning the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic engagements these poems represent. We hope, through the brief interviews we present here, to bring that element of our experience to a wider audience: that is, you, reading this, now.
Why Pastoral?
by Joshua Corey
Lycidas. But I was told Menalcas with his songsThis exchange between shepherds from Vergil’s Ninth Eclogue (translated by David Ferry) has long informed my sense of what’s at stake in drawing the line of genre around pastoral. The fantasy of a green refuge from politics and the history of “one bloody thing after another,” is entirely conditioned by history, politics, and violence. Menalcas is the figure of the poet who tries to protect “the land” from the incursions of history and the state with the pitifully inadequate weapon of songs and music. “Songs” are in fact not weapons at all: in Vergil’s 2000-year-old poem we get a glimpse of strategies of nonviolent resistance that would not themselves become historically potent until the twentieth century. To “speak for the trees,” Lorax-style, is a fully political strategy, and part of the public sphere: but it is a strategy that evokes a topos that transcends the realm of politics and history, which does not exist in the future like a communist utopia but nostalgically evokes a time and place that cannot be fully accessed without destroying its essential nonreality.
Had saved the land, from where those hills arise
To where they slope down gently to the water,
Near those old beech trees, with their broken tops.
Moeris. Yes, that was the story; but what can music do
Against the weapons of soldiers? When eagles come,
Tell me what doves can possibly do about it?
A classic example of such a pastoral rhetoric manifests in the defense of ANWAR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a place that most of us in the lower 48 who feel strongly about its preservation from oil exploitation will never see or visit: in fact, if every defender of ANWAR were to visit, it would put a severe strain on its ecological carrying capacity. Underneath arguments for preserving ANWAR’s biological diversity, or the way of life of the Inupiat and Gwich’in peoples who live there, is a structure of feeling that goes back to Thoreau’s claim that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World.” ANWAR functions in the collective imagination as a kind of amulet or pastoral charm, in which we concentrate a version of the fantasy of the great green place that acts as a counterweight to our guilty knowledge that modern civilization as we live it is physically, ecologically, and spiritually unsustainable.
Guilt, longing, transcendence: there is no myth or metaphorical structure that I know of that is as rich with ideological flows and excesses as the pastoral, and that is why my scholarly work has focused on it for so many years, closely united to my interest in the American modernist poetics we inherit from Stevens, Pound, Williams, and Stein. (If you really want to hear about it, as Holden Caulfield said, my dissertation on “The American Avant-Pastoral” is easy enough to Google.) But here I just want to suggest why G.C. and I oriented The Arcadia Project around the antique genre of pastoral rather than a more general term such as “nature poetry” or “ecopoetics.” As a poet, I subscribe to what Allen Grossman calls “the bitter logic of the poetic principle”: “Every poem of tradition (that is, every poem that serves to produce a future), every actual poem of the kind that comes to pass, indicates a virtual poem that the actual poem (the text at hand) postpones, as it were forever” (The Long Schoolroom 174). The actual poem, which seeks to represent subjectivity (for Grossman this is always a human subjectivity: the postmodern pastoral tends in this direction but also represents the possibility of another, post- or nonhuman subject), “imports a boundless version of
Not all, perhaps even not many, of the poets represented in The Arcadia Project will subscribe to a vision pastoral so defined, and in the weeks and months to come we hope and expect for a conversation that will dispute and enlarge the territory the book encompasses. In the meantime, we are haunted by Moeris’s question: what can music do? Can a poem give us access to a world of transcendental value? Or can it only lead us back by variegated roads to the reality in front of our noses, that the virtual conceals?
Heavy Weather, or: Why “Postmodern”?
by Joshua Corey
When G.C. and I first began kicking around the idea for this anthology five or so years ago, we struggled to find a label that could adequately describe, or at least reference, the diversity of the approaches and styles of poem that we expected to collect. It is a diversity that has since exceeded our expectations, which makes our choice of the “postmodern” monicker even more questionable. For the most advanced theory-heads out there, postmodern is passé–some would even argue that the worldwide crisis in capitalism that began in 2008 means that we have finally definitively left postmodernism behind us, as we enter a scary new world of instability on almost every front–political, economic, climatological, you name it.
I would argue, however, that the term postmodern still has its work to do, at the very least as a descriptor of the intellectual and aesthetic climate that presided over the creation of most of the poems in our anthology, all of which were first published no earlier than 1995. We chose this cut-off date because we wanted to present an anthology of the now, as opposed to a historical presentation of innovations in the pastoral (a worthy project, but a different one; for a sketch of that history, see my article “A Long Foreground,” elsewhere on this site). There are various dates available to the history of American ecological consciousness that we might have used instead: 1965, the year a nascent environmental movement did battle to save Storm King Mountain from development by Con Ed; 1970, the first Earth Day; 1973, the passage of the Endangered Species Act; 1989, the year of the Exxon Valdez oil spill; 2005, the year of the Kyoto Protocol. 1995 is not in itself a landmark, though like any past year it can be scrutinized for signs and portents: the White Earthquake in Chile, Typhoon Angela in the Philippines, or the publication in The New York Times of Ted Kaczynski‘s Unabomber Manifesto. It marks the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of millennial consciousness; it is my sense as well that it was in that year, or at any rate in that decade, that the question of environmental and ecological crisis became finally unignorable even by those with the greatest stakes in ignoring it. In the cicada’s life of seventeen years since that date the issue we blandly refer to as “climate change” has surged to the forefront of world consciousness, and it may very well be this year, 2012, that we look back on as the year that people finally “got it,” because the hyperobject of climate change had finally begun to express itself in terms of weather, possibly the most complex abstraction that we are capable of comprehending with our bodies and not just our minds.
I have considered many other terms to define the poetic phenomenon that has preoccupied me for more than a decade now: avant-pastoral and negative pastoral have each had their day, as well as broader terms like ecopoetics. If I were to choose the broadest term for this kind of writing it would probably be post-pastoral, for the sense that the prefix “post-” gives to the object it modifies as that which is conditioned by that object but which also struggles against it, trying to become something new. Ultimately we settled on “postmodern pastoral” for the purposes of this anthology because we wanted the dual dialectic that that term suggests: poetry that is conditioned by the (now fast unraveling) cultural logic of late capitalism but which is also affiliated, sometimes contentiously, with the enduring fantasy of a simpler, greener world.
Postmodernism may no longer be the right term to describe our cultural climate, but a new concept is still emergent. So postmodern will do as a descriptor of the weather that these contemporary pastoral poems track (sometimes quite literally), which impacts the forms and aesthetic decisions of poets working to translate the reality of life on our wounded planet into something readers can feel and judge for themselves.
Next time I will have something to say about the other debatable term that we have attached to our anthology, pastoral, as well as the main title, The Arcadia Project, which has more to do with Walter Benjamin’s famously unfinished opus than you might expect.
I would argue, however, that the term postmodern still has its work to do, at the very least as a descriptor of the intellectual and aesthetic climate that presided over the creation of most of the poems in our anthology, all of which were first published no earlier than 1995. We chose this cut-off date because we wanted to present an anthology of the now, as opposed to a historical presentation of innovations in the pastoral (a worthy project, but a different one; for a sketch of that history, see my article “A Long Foreground,” elsewhere on this site). There are various dates available to the history of American ecological consciousness that we might have used instead: 1965, the year a nascent environmental movement did battle to save Storm King Mountain from development by Con Ed; 1970, the first Earth Day; 1973, the passage of the Endangered Species Act; 1989, the year of the Exxon Valdez oil spill; 2005, the year of the Kyoto Protocol. 1995 is not in itself a landmark, though like any past year it can be scrutinized for signs and portents: the White Earthquake in Chile, Typhoon Angela in the Philippines, or the publication in The New York Times of Ted Kaczynski‘s Unabomber Manifesto. It marks the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of millennial consciousness; it is my sense as well that it was in that year, or at any rate in that decade, that the question of environmental and ecological crisis became finally unignorable even by those with the greatest stakes in ignoring it. In the cicada’s life of seventeen years since that date the issue we blandly refer to as “climate change” has surged to the forefront of world consciousness, and it may very well be this year, 2012, that we look back on as the year that people finally “got it,” because the hyperobject of climate change had finally begun to express itself in terms of weather, possibly the most complex abstraction that we are capable of comprehending with our bodies and not just our minds.
I have considered many other terms to define the poetic phenomenon that has preoccupied me for more than a decade now: avant-pastoral and negative pastoral have each had their day, as well as broader terms like ecopoetics. If I were to choose the broadest term for this kind of writing it would probably be post-pastoral, for the sense that the prefix “post-” gives to the object it modifies as that which is conditioned by that object but which also struggles against it, trying to become something new. Ultimately we settled on “postmodern pastoral” for the purposes of this anthology because we wanted the dual dialectic that that term suggests: poetry that is conditioned by the (now fast unraveling) cultural logic of late capitalism but which is also affiliated, sometimes contentiously, with the enduring fantasy of a simpler, greener world.
Postmodernism may no longer be the right term to describe our cultural climate, but a new concept is still emergent. So postmodern will do as a descriptor of the weather that these contemporary pastoral poems track (sometimes quite literally), which impacts the forms and aesthetic decisions of poets working to translate the reality of life on our wounded planet into something readers can feel and judge for themselves.
Next time I will have something to say about the other debatable term that we have attached to our anthology, pastoral, as well as the main title, The Arcadia Project, which has more to do with Walter Benjamin’s famously unfinished opus than you might expect.
Notes for Poetries and Ecologies Panel
by Jonathan Skinner
(Rethinking Poetics, Columbia University, 12 June, 2010)
Download article as a PDFecopoetics is dedicating to exploring creative-critical edges between writing (with an emphasis on poetry) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings). That’s the original masthead, launched almost ten years ago.
ecopoetics was conceived as a site, not a genre. In the sense of site-specificity as developed out of the 1960’s art world, but also in the sense of theories of distributed consciousness, as explored by philosophers such as Bruno Latour, Edwin Hutchins, Richard Taylor, N. Katherine Hayles, or Donna Haraway. Theories exploring the idea that consciousness, and maybe agency, are distributed “out there,” amongst the “objects” of the world, rather than “in here” (tapping skull). So I don’t aspire to publish “ecopoems” or to identify “ecopoets,” but to offer an overtly-dedicated site, to which different kinds of practices can contribute.
Continue reading Notes for Poetries and Ecologies Panel…
From the introduction by Joshua Corey
by Joshua Corey
“The blade of grass, the record store: necessary inclusions to the Arcadias of these poems (though the grass may be engineered by Monsanto, though the record store may be an MP3-blog or the CD rack at WalMart). Postmodern pastoral retains certain allegiances to the lyric and to individual subjectivity while insisting on the reality of a world whose objects are all equally natural, and therefore equally unnatural. Because this is an anthology of poems, its primary orientation, its allegiance, must be to the aesthetic, to the movements of language and the imagination. Yet as the ecocritic Kate Soper has remarked, ‘it is not language that has a hole in its ozone layer’; imagining ‘the good life,’ or its betrayal, has a clear relation to the actual suffering world. Postmodern pastoral offers a means of mapping the shifting terrain of that world while maintaining its ethical consciousness that the map must never be mistaken for the territory.”
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