Hi all,
In case you want more to read, I've found an interesting article on the Ammons poem "Garbage", so I'm pasting the link here:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3708/is_199604/ai_n8739951/pg_9/?tag=content;col1
In thinking more about this book-length poem, I'd like for us to ruminate on the lines from the poem that assert that the garbage heap is a "legit museum of our desecrations" ... Written when Ammons was in his 60's (after a long life of poetry), this is Ammons's reflection on the century that lay behind him, viewing the garbage dump as a "cultural monument". Keep in mind that the book is written as a single sentence in couplets in seventeen sections and ends in a period. And as I mentioned in class, it was written on a continuous piece of adding machine tape, unbroken. Again, how do all of these things implicate the poetic act as part of the garbage heap or somehow separate from it, or is it all part of the same energy force and if so, what do we make of that from an ecocritical perspective?
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ReplyDeleteReading this article, I cant stop thinking of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" which was written in 1817--so I guess about 175 years before "Garbage." At firt, I expected this to be the romantic antithesis to Garbage. But its amazing how, even aside from their cultural and socio-political moments, the two look very similarly at the human relation to nature, the fears which stem from nature and unknowing, and the poem's momentary resolve as a stay against these human tendencies. Clearly, Bryant's unadulterated natural world is not available to Ammons, yet, the compost mix of science and spirituality is still found in nature: "oh, yes, yes, the matter goes on, / turning into this and that, never the same thing."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what to do with this poem in relation to ecopoetics yet, but I thought I'd post it anyhow, in case it spurs any conversation.
Thanatopsis
TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements;
To be a brother to the insensible rock,
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world,—with kings,
The powerful of the earth,—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man! The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings,—yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest; and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
(responding to Magda and DiCiccio, and filtered through a whole lot of DayQuil . . . )
ReplyDeleteThe irony in titling your work of art "Garbage" is that art and garbage seem antonymical, in terms of preservation: art is what is worth keeping. When we deem something a work of art, we work to preserve it: perhaps in controlled environmental an archive or a museum, perhaps in persistence and pervasiveness of of multiple copies, but in either case, neither the Mona Lisa nor Twilight are going to be un-preserved any time soon. Attempts at art which fail to be met as art by the relevant critics (whether full-fledged gallumphing Bloomian capitalized-Critics or the hoi polloi tastes constituting "popular opinion," or any of the mediate social/economic tides and winds in between that influence what we remember and what we value) also go unpreserved and undisseminated -- they are not published, not archived, not part of cultural memory and awareness. Garbage, meanwhile, is what is not worth keeping, what we casually don't keep and don't even think about keeping, what we emphatically don't want to preserve, given the ecological problems posed by landfills and toxic waste and non-biodegradable kleenex.
But this binary collapses, as binaries are wont to do, as soon as you add the dimension of history. A medievalist who specializes in the writings of Leofric Mortimer Chirius of Henleburg may be aware that his contemporaries considered his writing "garbage," but that won't stop her from publishing an edition; an archaeologist unearthing the royal Minoan landfill will very carefully catalogue and safeguard every piece of Bronze-age garbage she finds. Garbage gets preserved, art is found in what had been rejected as garbage (think of the archetypical misunderstood-in-his-own-time artist, recovered by a later, more sympathetic audience), and once an item as historical value, it becomes worthy of preservation, whether it has (or has had) artistic value or not.
So what is Ammons doing with garbage? The connotative consequence of calling it garbage suggests that it is what shouldn't be preserved, but writing a poem about it elevates it to art, especially in the hands of an established artist; the very act of writing about it is a sort of rehabilitative preservation. There are only a few really garbage-focused snippets in the excerpt we've read, most explicitly the passage in which the speaker goes to the library to research garbage disposal, doesn't find what he's looking for, but already knowing what one does with garbage -- "disposes" of it -- he decides to jettison the "junk," the information itself: "most / of the catalog" is garbage. This is his cantankerous jumping-off point for taking down language, or at least the significance of human language. Just as the library catalog is junk, the adultation of words is "crap," more garbage. Earlier we're told that "we're trash" as the closing statement on a prophecy of medical disintegration -- whether we're worth preserving or not, we're unpreservable -- though "plenty wondrous," endowed with "a tiny wriggle of light in the mind that says 'go on'." Preservable or not, humans have the instinct for self-preservation. If this is a poem meant to reflect the meaning of the twentieth century, as DiCiccio reads it, then what do we now know about the twentieth century, having considered its garbage, read a culture through the things it chooses not to preserve? Garbage, after all, which is history is no longer garbage, unless history itself is garbage.
Okay, I just ran across another poem that seems, to my mind, the opposite end of the ecopoetry spectrum. Perhaps this shows the extent to which the mode of irony in poetry, as a response to the world(Magda--I am thinking Campbell McGrath), pushes against the central objectives of ecopoetry.
ReplyDeleteNature Poem
Till the Clouds Roll By
A Patch of Blue
How Green Was My Valley
Spendor in the Grass
The Petrified Forest
The River of No Return
Lilies of the Field
The Bad Seed
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Autumn Leaves
Lost Horizon
Gone With the Wind.
"Nature Poem" is by David Trinidad, a poet who will be here for the IU Writer's Conference in June (and will give public reading at the Waldron for anyone interested). I should say that this one poem is not an accurate representation of his work--he has 12 books or so and has done some really interesting work. This poem is from his most recent collection: "The Late Show".
This discussion reminds me of an art lecture I attended when I was a design student. (This was 12 years ago, so I hope in a later post to provide some names.) The presenter was showing slides by an artist who lived in the woods. This artist specialized in watercolors depicting natural themes and settings (landscapes, birds, and so forth). However, once the paintings were completed, they were photographed, and the artist used them as kindling for his fires. One could hear the gasp across the lecture hall.
ReplyDeleteI realized then, and later when I shockingly saw fellow students photograph and then throw their projects away, how heavily many artists are invested in the THING. I spent a year or two trying, with admittedly little success, to detach myself from my work, often burning it or hitting it with bowling balls.
Then, later, an artist inspired by Andy Goldsworthy visited our campus. Here's a link to Andy Goldsworthy's work:
http://images.google.com/images?q=andy+goldsworthy&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=ZXnbSa-JNpbWlQf_8fn5Bw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title
I found that this approach to the visual arts was a great way to detach the artist from the THING created. Our studios broke up into smaller groups, and we spent a day creating artwork out of sticks and bent reeds, to be photographed and disassembled later.
So here's my question: Can we think of this approach in the visual arts to be a useful counterpart to the aims of ecopoetry, in which we borrow and manipulate, yet never "own," the components of the piece, such as the media or the language? Does this lend itself more readily to the visual arts than to verbal arts?
(Incidentally, I was forced to detach myself from the THINGness of art last summer when my garage flooded and destroyed most of my artwork. Sump-pump-less, my tiny bit of civilization on 16th st. was overpowered by nature.)