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?
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Ecopoetic Re-Action: Refurbishing Poetics
Humans are deceived in believing language is the organizer of the universe, Scigaj argues, quoting Synder: “when logos-orented philosophers uncritically advance language as a unique human gift which serves as the organizer of the chaotic universe—it is a delusion.” Instead, language—which comes after the universe—is a means to reorganizing our conception of the universe as it exists apart from us. Potentially, language (at best) may serve to ground us in the world by articulating or accurately reflecting experience in the natural world—originary experience. Thus, authentic language is that which reflects experience in the world, since the world is what it stems from. Language used this way always “looks back”—reminds the human what comes before the human. What follows from this logic is a humble notion that the honest or authentic voice is always writing in homage to what preexists it—to the source that present day resources derive from. For a poet, who must use her resources to get to the source, what does this mean?
There seems to be many competing “sources” –first and foremost to Scigaj is the natural world overlaid with “human hands” and the resulting environmental imperatives. While he prescribes for us the need to de“purify” (2) and reprioritize the aims of poetry—which is the very move he demonstrates in the five pages of reportage that follow his prescription, he must still “turn to literary criticism and theory” to activate his prescription. That there is another cannon he must turn to, in addition to the facts of the environment, which he must also acknowledge reinforces the binary between natural world / made world or world as text and suggest that the two exist as separate and often competing sources of language. Even if the goal of “depurification” is to remove the scaffolding of language, as Merwin often attempts to do, in order to access original experience in the world, such a goal first requires one to do the very thing that originary experience supposedly preempts. Isn’t this inherently a contradiction? That we always have to uncover originary experience with language (even if language is dismantling language), and then once we access “it” we can either experience it individually in “an active space” (perhaps the deep ecological/first-wave option) which must also be silence, or else, we can extend it outward/articulate/reflect—but only, again, through language. One of the primary and formative arguments Scigaj makes is that language is always AFTER “origin”ary experience; if it is always after the fact, isn’t language, then, always evidence of the gap between the original and the present / world experience and word experience? To acknowledge that writing then occurs in “the gaps”, as Magda says Hass and Graham do, seems more honest, authentic—and humble! than presuming one can access any other sort of present reality through or apart from language. At this point in time, where even Scigaj must take into account the world of literary criticism and theory as it competes with the environment as a foundation for knowledge and experience, it seems he would have to have a time machine, or else a really deep shovel in order to truly access the origin without simultaneously accessing the only means we can access it by. That the experience is originary demonstrates the impossibility of accessing the origin apart from what moves it. Here, the world occurs in the mind as it occurs outside it—always moving. How, then, can we truly transcend the movement that occurs apart from us? It seems we can only do it by constructing a space—however transient, ephemeral, and apart from “the world”—to meditate on the world. An “active space” as Snyder and other ecopoetics suggest, a necessity to return—to react—post-reflection.
So, it seems that ecopoetry attempts at that same discursive turning back and forth that Thoreau takes on in Walden—that active repositioning of the self in relation to the world through a language that most accurately reflects that passage between word and world. I think back to how Thoreau, in Economy, wants to eliminate “fuel” as a resource, and how he wants to disinherit all the associations and referents of the “outside” world or society. However, the reality is that he must return to The Village—and not only after but even during his two years in Walden—and he can only conceive of the world he wants to access in relation to the world he attempts to leave or put off. Each consecutive experience is colored by the one before it and nothing is devoid of associations. While in Walden, he makes sense of his surroundings in terms of a prior economy, and when he enters into The Village, he hears the sounds of carts and wheels and human agency as the sounds of birds he recalls from Walden. In essence, he is not disinheriting one world and inheriting another, nor is he separating the two, or abstracting one from the other, he is simply choosing to move back and forth between the two as they exist, turning and returning. The back and forth does reinforce a certain gap between two worlds , where one cannot take away or cover over the other, the sheer movement back and forth enables Thoreau to, as he says the fisherman do, “stitch the world together,”—even if only “in parts.” Furthermore, that the two worlds (natural and human as well as individual/society) cannot be collapsed, eliminated, abstracted, or fully stitched, despite the movement, implicates the human as the agent of their conceived relationship. It also shows such relationship-making to be somewhat arbitrary, futile, and completely unnecessary for nature’s sake. Ammons poetry shows that what underlies relationships are separations or differences –none of which the “whole globe” cannot “belong to.” Separations, then, like relationships are human devices for human ends and language is means for this closed circuit. Perhaps the goal of a “refurbishing” language in ecopoetics is to unstitch and restitch, if only to see the essential materials apart from the self stitching them? If refurbishing language is the poetic action, then what is the poems end? Is it still a poem after the action is complete? Magda referred to the poem as an "artifact" in class today. Perhaps, ecopoetry, at its best, refurbishes language to enact originary experience that will sustain action--what on earth does this look like? And does such a language provide a communicative function or is it merely a demonstration? Thoreau, according to Buell’s essay in ISLE, is an ecopoet insofar as his environmentalism is continuous with his aesthetics. I wonder what this means on paper and if the same is true with Ammons and other ecopoets.
There seems to be many competing “sources” –first and foremost to Scigaj is the natural world overlaid with “human hands” and the resulting environmental imperatives. While he prescribes for us the need to de“purify” (2) and reprioritize the aims of poetry—which is the very move he demonstrates in the five pages of reportage that follow his prescription, he must still “turn to literary criticism and theory” to activate his prescription. That there is another cannon he must turn to, in addition to the facts of the environment, which he must also acknowledge reinforces the binary between natural world / made world or world as text and suggest that the two exist as separate and often competing sources of language. Even if the goal of “depurification” is to remove the scaffolding of language, as Merwin often attempts to do, in order to access original experience in the world, such a goal first requires one to do the very thing that originary experience supposedly preempts. Isn’t this inherently a contradiction? That we always have to uncover originary experience with language (even if language is dismantling language), and then once we access “it” we can either experience it individually in “an active space” (perhaps the deep ecological/first-wave option) which must also be silence, or else, we can extend it outward/articulate/reflect—but only, again, through language. One of the primary and formative arguments Scigaj makes is that language is always AFTER “origin”ary experience; if it is always after the fact, isn’t language, then, always evidence of the gap between the original and the present / world experience and word experience? To acknowledge that writing then occurs in “the gaps”, as Magda says Hass and Graham do, seems more honest, authentic—and humble! than presuming one can access any other sort of present reality through or apart from language. At this point in time, where even Scigaj must take into account the world of literary criticism and theory as it competes with the environment as a foundation for knowledge and experience, it seems he would have to have a time machine, or else a really deep shovel in order to truly access the origin without simultaneously accessing the only means we can access it by. That the experience is originary demonstrates the impossibility of accessing the origin apart from what moves it. Here, the world occurs in the mind as it occurs outside it—always moving. How, then, can we truly transcend the movement that occurs apart from us? It seems we can only do it by constructing a space—however transient, ephemeral, and apart from “the world”—to meditate on the world. An “active space” as Snyder and other ecopoetics suggest, a necessity to return—to react—post-reflection.
So, it seems that ecopoetry attempts at that same discursive turning back and forth that Thoreau takes on in Walden—that active repositioning of the self in relation to the world through a language that most accurately reflects that passage between word and world. I think back to how Thoreau, in Economy, wants to eliminate “fuel” as a resource, and how he wants to disinherit all the associations and referents of the “outside” world or society. However, the reality is that he must return to The Village—and not only after but even during his two years in Walden—and he can only conceive of the world he wants to access in relation to the world he attempts to leave or put off. Each consecutive experience is colored by the one before it and nothing is devoid of associations. While in Walden, he makes sense of his surroundings in terms of a prior economy, and when he enters into The Village, he hears the sounds of carts and wheels and human agency as the sounds of birds he recalls from Walden. In essence, he is not disinheriting one world and inheriting another, nor is he separating the two, or abstracting one from the other, he is simply choosing to move back and forth between the two as they exist, turning and returning. The back and forth does reinforce a certain gap between two worlds , where one cannot take away or cover over the other, the sheer movement back and forth enables Thoreau to, as he says the fisherman do, “stitch the world together,”—even if only “in parts.” Furthermore, that the two worlds (natural and human as well as individual/society) cannot be collapsed, eliminated, abstracted, or fully stitched, despite the movement, implicates the human as the agent of their conceived relationship. It also shows such relationship-making to be somewhat arbitrary, futile, and completely unnecessary for nature’s sake. Ammons poetry shows that what underlies relationships are separations or differences –none of which the “whole globe” cannot “belong to.” Separations, then, like relationships are human devices for human ends and language is means for this closed circuit. Perhaps the goal of a “refurbishing” language in ecopoetics is to unstitch and restitch, if only to see the essential materials apart from the self stitching them? If refurbishing language is the poetic action, then what is the poems end? Is it still a poem after the action is complete? Magda referred to the poem as an "artifact" in class today. Perhaps, ecopoetry, at its best, refurbishes language to enact originary experience that will sustain action--what on earth does this look like? And does such a language provide a communicative function or is it merely a demonstration? Thoreau, according to Buell’s essay in ISLE, is an ecopoet insofar as his environmentalism is continuous with his aesthetics. I wonder what this means on paper and if the same is true with Ammons and other ecopoets.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
BLOGGING UNDER ERASURE
I don’t know if it’s just me, but at a number of points reading Ammons’ “garbage” (no affront intended) I was reminded of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (though this is from my very cursory undergraduate reading of it; so those of you who know more about modern poetry, be kind in correcting me). From what I gather from Scigaj’s introduction, it is this sort of posstructuralist self-referential poetry that is eco-poetry’s bête-noir; the bullshit that Ammons’ et. al. want us to cut. My sense though is that this poetry is so in dialogue with posstructuralist ideas that the two are bound to sound familiar at times; and both, moreover, share paradoxes of self-reference—Derrida was plagued by the fact that he had to use the tools of Western metaphysics to deconstruct it; ecocritical poets must use language to refer us beyond it. Also, both are concerned with attacking hyperrationalism; even if ecopoetics aligns deconstruction with empty abstraction—both favor “becoming” (at least Ammons advocates this sort of “process” metaphysics in “Corsons Inlet”)-- over Being…..
It could also be argued that ecopoetics has certain types of rationality it favors: certainly it values empirical science highly—“biocentrism” implies that scientific knowledge does not simply construct, but points us towards “reality.” Even if this seems to me an article of faith, I’m having a difficult time aligning this faith in science to refer us to the real with this equal insistence on a phenomenological “originary experience.” It seemed to me from Scigaj’s introduction that the phenomenological experience of the non-linguistic “thing”—Ponty’s “figure” emerging from a “ground”—is where ecopoets hope to return us. But to claim that language first depends upon us being endowed with perception does not to me seem to point to an ecocentric position—it still refers back to our experience of things as things. Perhaps this is a strategic anthropocentrism—like the way Ammons claims that primates say all that we can say through the medium of grooming—but to point to the originary experience of a tree is not to point to the tree itself. Subsequently, although Scigaj claims that ecopoetry aims to get beyond immanence, it seems to be a celebration of immanence; that is, immanence as our supposedly pre-linguistic or a-linguistic perception of what Ammons calls “facts.” My feeling is that what ecopoetry really wants to urge us towards is a sense of wonder at the ground of our experience, the nature that undergirds our consciousness and subsequently our language. This romantic, poetic comportment towards the a priori seems strange though when it relies on scientific narrative…do ecopoets want us to believe that the scientific object, say, sexual morphology in dung beetles, is not the product of our language games? Or that it will direct us towards an originary experience? Is the “interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” Scigaj refers to something we can understand without a network of scientists? Without mediation? Without language? Can grooming tell us this? I’m not sure, but I’m reminded of the way in which popular science these days often translates into a quasi-religious sense of grandeur and amazement. Which is maybe what we need to derail our current collision course with doom. If the ecopoets are right, my feeble attempt here to understand poetry rationally (if what comes above qualifies as ‘rational’) misses the point completely. In this case, I take it all back.
It could also be argued that ecopoetics has certain types of rationality it favors: certainly it values empirical science highly—“biocentrism” implies that scientific knowledge does not simply construct, but points us towards “reality.” Even if this seems to me an article of faith, I’m having a difficult time aligning this faith in science to refer us to the real with this equal insistence on a phenomenological “originary experience.” It seemed to me from Scigaj’s introduction that the phenomenological experience of the non-linguistic “thing”—Ponty’s “figure” emerging from a “ground”—is where ecopoets hope to return us. But to claim that language first depends upon us being endowed with perception does not to me seem to point to an ecocentric position—it still refers back to our experience of things as things. Perhaps this is a strategic anthropocentrism—like the way Ammons claims that primates say all that we can say through the medium of grooming—but to point to the originary experience of a tree is not to point to the tree itself. Subsequently, although Scigaj claims that ecopoetry aims to get beyond immanence, it seems to be a celebration of immanence; that is, immanence as our supposedly pre-linguistic or a-linguistic perception of what Ammons calls “facts.” My feeling is that what ecopoetry really wants to urge us towards is a sense of wonder at the ground of our experience, the nature that undergirds our consciousness and subsequently our language. This romantic, poetic comportment towards the a priori seems strange though when it relies on scientific narrative…do ecopoets want us to believe that the scientific object, say, sexual morphology in dung beetles, is not the product of our language games? Or that it will direct us towards an originary experience? Is the “interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” Scigaj refers to something we can understand without a network of scientists? Without mediation? Without language? Can grooming tell us this? I’m not sure, but I’m reminded of the way in which popular science these days often translates into a quasi-religious sense of grandeur and amazement. Which is maybe what we need to derail our current collision course with doom. If the ecopoets are right, my feeble attempt here to understand poetry rationally (if what comes above qualifies as ‘rational’) misses the point completely. In this case, I take it all back.
Notes on Merchant
Here is the note about our class that Merchant received from me:
Monday, March 30
10:30 am Meeting with Professor Christoph Irmscher and his students, IAS conference Room, Poplars 332.
"The students who will meet with you are all graduate students who are taking Professor Irmscher's 700-level ecocriticism class. They're familiar with some of your work. Throughout the semester, they've been talking about representations of nature in literary texts and ways in which ecologically conscious scholars can address such representations. They have read Lawrence Buell's The Future of Environmental Criticism, familiarized themselves with the history of environmental criticism, and brought these questions to bear on some canonical texts of environmental writing in the American tradition, including John James Audubon, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau and, perhaps a more unexpected choice, Edgar Allan Poe. They have also pondered alternate ways of addressing texts that deal with nature, mainly by reading Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. They're now branching out, reading texts about hunting, nature in Anglo-Saxon literature, the Canadian tradition, and so forth. They will probably be curious about ecofeminism (something they have only barely addressed during this semester) and how it's possible to remain committed to ecology in one's work without confusing scholarship and activism."
And here are my own notes about the essay I handed out (on Bacon and the "secrets of nature"):
"Though the essay is part of a more extended discussion (it's a response to a vitriolic essay by the Renaissance scholar Brian Vickers on what ecofeminism has done to Bacon scholarship), I picked it because it represents, in condensed form, Merchant's blend of history of science, feminism, and critique of the western tradition (which also includes critique of environmental depredation). She is interested in the transition from occult knowledge to public knowledge that took place in the 17th century and seeks to make a dent into the triumphalist narratives about the Scientific Revolution as a time of progress and hope. She also argues that traditional scholarship about the Scientific Revolution completely ignores the cost to the laboring classes and the environment (an argument she only gestures at in the current essay, though it's more fleshed out in her book, The Death of Nature).
She is critical of the 'conjoining' of science, technology, and mercantile capitalism that most of the scholarly debate seems to endorse. What Bacon did, in her view, was transpose the discourse about 'nature's secrets' (which in the occult tradition was something to which women could be privy, too) to the discourse of experimental science, which he helped create. This discourse is one of 'recovery'--we have a right to know these secrets, and experimental inquiry is a way of mitigating, or even undoing, the 'tragedy of the Fall.' Nature, in Bacon's writings, is connoted as female--and the place from which 'her' secrets need to be recovered is the 'womb' or the 'bosom' (see the lengthy footnote). Throughout the essay, she makes use of previous scholarship, notably that of Katharine Park.
In the Baconian tradition, nature, like Proteus, has to be constrained be experiments that force it out of its 'natural' condition. Women's bodies--like nature-are understood to contain 'secrets' that need to be extracted violently in the service of humanity--viz. the anatomical theatre of the Renaissance or the locations for nature study that are created (museums, botanical gardens etc.) where nature is disciplined."
Some questions we could ask her:
1. Is the western tradition really that monolithic? What about male writers that have opted out of this tradition--Goethe (who critiqued Newton's experimentalism), Thoreau, or even Poe?
2. Since she herself describes the scientific revolution as having had beneficial and irreversible results and modern science can't seem to do without experiments, where does that leave us today? Is there hope for the future? How can critique translate into activism? Should it? Are we condemning ourselves to (humanistic) irrelevance if we start criticizing the Baconian tradition today?
3. Don't we run the risk of reifying gender divisions if we adopt Merchant's reading?
4. If environmental criticism becomes part of the academy (acquires orthodoxy, so to speak), will it lose its provocative edge? (Example: Buell's book, in which environmental criticism ends up being a form of postcolonial critique and "nature" as a critical problem threatens to become lost).
Feel free to add questions to this--this is just a very preliminary list.
Christoph
Monday, March 30
10:30 am Meeting with Professor Christoph Irmscher and his students, IAS conference Room, Poplars 332.
"The students who will meet with you are all graduate students who are taking Professor Irmscher's 700-level ecocriticism class. They're familiar with some of your work. Throughout the semester, they've been talking about representations of nature in literary texts and ways in which ecologically conscious scholars can address such representations. They have read Lawrence Buell's The Future of Environmental Criticism, familiarized themselves with the history of environmental criticism, and brought these questions to bear on some canonical texts of environmental writing in the American tradition, including John James Audubon, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau and, perhaps a more unexpected choice, Edgar Allan Poe. They have also pondered alternate ways of addressing texts that deal with nature, mainly by reading Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. They're now branching out, reading texts about hunting, nature in Anglo-Saxon literature, the Canadian tradition, and so forth. They will probably be curious about ecofeminism (something they have only barely addressed during this semester) and how it's possible to remain committed to ecology in one's work without confusing scholarship and activism."
And here are my own notes about the essay I handed out (on Bacon and the "secrets of nature"):
"Though the essay is part of a more extended discussion (it's a response to a vitriolic essay by the Renaissance scholar Brian Vickers on what ecofeminism has done to Bacon scholarship), I picked it because it represents, in condensed form, Merchant's blend of history of science, feminism, and critique of the western tradition (which also includes critique of environmental depredation). She is interested in the transition from occult knowledge to public knowledge that took place in the 17th century and seeks to make a dent into the triumphalist narratives about the Scientific Revolution as a time of progress and hope. She also argues that traditional scholarship about the Scientific Revolution completely ignores the cost to the laboring classes and the environment (an argument she only gestures at in the current essay, though it's more fleshed out in her book, The Death of Nature).
She is critical of the 'conjoining' of science, technology, and mercantile capitalism that most of the scholarly debate seems to endorse. What Bacon did, in her view, was transpose the discourse about 'nature's secrets' (which in the occult tradition was something to which women could be privy, too) to the discourse of experimental science, which he helped create. This discourse is one of 'recovery'--we have a right to know these secrets, and experimental inquiry is a way of mitigating, or even undoing, the 'tragedy of the Fall.' Nature, in Bacon's writings, is connoted as female--and the place from which 'her' secrets need to be recovered is the 'womb' or the 'bosom' (see the lengthy footnote). Throughout the essay, she makes use of previous scholarship, notably that of Katharine Park.
In the Baconian tradition, nature, like Proteus, has to be constrained be experiments that force it out of its 'natural' condition. Women's bodies--like nature-are understood to contain 'secrets' that need to be extracted violently in the service of humanity--viz. the anatomical theatre of the Renaissance or the locations for nature study that are created (museums, botanical gardens etc.) where nature is disciplined."
Some questions we could ask her:
1. Is the western tradition really that monolithic? What about male writers that have opted out of this tradition--Goethe (who critiqued Newton's experimentalism), Thoreau, or even Poe?
2. Since she herself describes the scientific revolution as having had beneficial and irreversible results and modern science can't seem to do without experiments, where does that leave us today? Is there hope for the future? How can critique translate into activism? Should it? Are we condemning ourselves to (humanistic) irrelevance if we start criticizing the Baconian tradition today?
3. Don't we run the risk of reifying gender divisions if we adopt Merchant's reading?
4. If environmental criticism becomes part of the academy (acquires orthodoxy, so to speak), will it lose its provocative edge? (Example: Buell's book, in which environmental criticism ends up being a form of postcolonial critique and "nature" as a critical problem threatens to become lost).
Feel free to add questions to this--this is just a very preliminary list.
Christoph
Thursday, March 26, 2009
We Are Only Ourselves
I remain intrigued by the woman in section II of "Audubon," and the statement that she "is what she is," in contrast with Audubon, who seems to be never content with himself as himself in the poem. In section IV, he begins to come to terms with the idea that "he was,/ In the end, himself and not what/ He had known he ought to be." And yet he is always aware of this "ought to be," this self he is trying to achieve, or perhaps "hunt down," throughout the poem. Again, in section IV, we get an image of the self as "the self that was, the self that is, and there,/ Far off but in range, completing that alignment, your fate" (and this self-in-process is seen "as though down a rifle barrel").
The woman in section II, on the other hand, is described from the start in terms that foreshadow her end. Her face "hangs," and her hands also "hang," from the moment Audubon enters the cabin. Later the woman's whole body "sways like a willow," much like it will sway from the trees after she is hanged.
As we noted in class, the woman also has a different relationship with time than does Audubon. She is denied the watch and its "magic," for reasons locked in the "secret order of the world." Whatever the reason, for her there is no time, and no God, it seems either. At least, God for her is not a promise of hope for any kind of redemption, but a seemingly malevolent cause for "folks" who are so often causes of suffering.
These strange qualities of this woman, which in the poem become strangely arousing to Audubon, seem to be reflected also in the source story for this section of the poem, "The Prairie." Audubon does not give much in the way of describing the woman in the cabin, but at the end of the story he alludes to her (and, presumably, her sons) as exceptional in two ways. The "inhabitants of the cabin," Audubon assures us, "were not Americans." Clearly, this is important for those Europeans considering a trip to America, or for proud Americans themselves to know about the quality of Americans - they are not the kind of people who would scheme to kill a tired traveller stopping by who happens to also have a nice watch. But, perhaps more importantly, Audubon seems to suggest that these cabin-dwellers were not truly human, either. "During upwards of twenty-five years," he writes, "this was the only time at which my life was in danger from my fellow creatures." These cabin-dwellers are not only un-American, but they are exceptional among humans, to the point of being, perhaps, inhuman. Perhaps they are animals.
This marking of the woman and her sons in "The Prairie" and the woman especially in "Audubon" as other than human does at least two things: it maintains the sense that humans are moral creatures, who do not kill (or scheme to kill) each other for their watches, and it excuses the act of killing done by Audubon and the two or three men ("The Prairie" and "Audubon" differ on this) who help save Audubon and the Indian in the cabin from the woman and her sons. Because the woman "is what she is," when she is hanged there is no question of morality. She was always already hanging. For her, for reasons unknown to any but the "secret order," time is not real, God is not real, and neither is any notion of "ought," of a self she is not now but is striving to be in the future. Her humanity, for whatever reason, is already gone, and thus her hanging is not an act of murder.
This is the overt argument of the two stories, at least. One might find in Audubon's insistence on these cabin "inhabitants" as un-American and even inhuman a little too much protesting. And reading "The Prairie" carefully, it is not clear that Audubon ever has a definite threat on his life -- he merely suspects that the woman and her sons are preparing to kill him. In the poem, the extended narration of the hanging in part K and Audubon's reflections and "tears" in part L lead one to question the justice of what has been done.
One might continue to ask why her humanity is gone (has something been done to her in the past?), or whether society's preoccupations with time, God, and self-perfection are essential indicators of "humanity." But it does seem that both "The Prairie" and "Audubon" work around, and perhaps also challenge (we do not have to accept the hangings in either version as justified, and there is cause for suspicion in both) these differences between human and animal, which excuse the hangings as just another case of humans destroying a non-human, monstrous threat. "Audubon" may in fact be critical of this human/animal distinction, as the title of the section immediately following the hanging emphasizes, in bold letters, "we are only ourselves."
The woman in section II, on the other hand, is described from the start in terms that foreshadow her end. Her face "hangs," and her hands also "hang," from the moment Audubon enters the cabin. Later the woman's whole body "sways like a willow," much like it will sway from the trees after she is hanged.
As we noted in class, the woman also has a different relationship with time than does Audubon. She is denied the watch and its "magic," for reasons locked in the "secret order of the world." Whatever the reason, for her there is no time, and no God, it seems either. At least, God for her is not a promise of hope for any kind of redemption, but a seemingly malevolent cause for "folks" who are so often causes of suffering.
These strange qualities of this woman, which in the poem become strangely arousing to Audubon, seem to be reflected also in the source story for this section of the poem, "The Prairie." Audubon does not give much in the way of describing the woman in the cabin, but at the end of the story he alludes to her (and, presumably, her sons) as exceptional in two ways. The "inhabitants of the cabin," Audubon assures us, "were not Americans." Clearly, this is important for those Europeans considering a trip to America, or for proud Americans themselves to know about the quality of Americans - they are not the kind of people who would scheme to kill a tired traveller stopping by who happens to also have a nice watch. But, perhaps more importantly, Audubon seems to suggest that these cabin-dwellers were not truly human, either. "During upwards of twenty-five years," he writes, "this was the only time at which my life was in danger from my fellow creatures." These cabin-dwellers are not only un-American, but they are exceptional among humans, to the point of being, perhaps, inhuman. Perhaps they are animals.
This marking of the woman and her sons in "The Prairie" and the woman especially in "Audubon" as other than human does at least two things: it maintains the sense that humans are moral creatures, who do not kill (or scheme to kill) each other for their watches, and it excuses the act of killing done by Audubon and the two or three men ("The Prairie" and "Audubon" differ on this) who help save Audubon and the Indian in the cabin from the woman and her sons. Because the woman "is what she is," when she is hanged there is no question of morality. She was always already hanging. For her, for reasons unknown to any but the "secret order," time is not real, God is not real, and neither is any notion of "ought," of a self she is not now but is striving to be in the future. Her humanity, for whatever reason, is already gone, and thus her hanging is not an act of murder.
This is the overt argument of the two stories, at least. One might find in Audubon's insistence on these cabin "inhabitants" as un-American and even inhuman a little too much protesting. And reading "The Prairie" carefully, it is not clear that Audubon ever has a definite threat on his life -- he merely suspects that the woman and her sons are preparing to kill him. In the poem, the extended narration of the hanging in part K and Audubon's reflections and "tears" in part L lead one to question the justice of what has been done.
One might continue to ask why her humanity is gone (has something been done to her in the past?), or whether society's preoccupations with time, God, and self-perfection are essential indicators of "humanity." But it does seem that both "The Prairie" and "Audubon" work around, and perhaps also challenge (we do not have to accept the hangings in either version as justified, and there is cause for suspicion in both) these differences between human and animal, which excuse the hangings as just another case of humans destroying a non-human, monstrous threat. "Audubon" may in fact be critical of this human/animal distinction, as the title of the section immediately following the hanging emphasizes, in bold letters, "we are only ourselves."
EcoPoetics: the work of AR Ammons
In trying to focus our discussion on Ecopoetry next Tuesday, I was hoping we could begin with some central ideas to ecopoetry discussed in Leonard Scigaj’s fine book Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets with an emphasis on the work of A.R. Ammons. Let me explain how I’ve laid out the .pdf that Christoph posted on Oncourse in an attempt to help you make sense of it. The first two sections (pgs 1-41) lay some of the foundation of ecocritical/ecopoetic ideas with an emphasis on référance, original experience and the tendency of ecopoets to resist poststructural theories of language (and the insistence that all experience is mediated by language); pgs 83-94 offer critical insight and analysis into the work of A.R. Ammons as an ecopoet, which is followed by a sampling of A.R. Ammons’s poetry including a selection of the book-length poem Garbage, and the poems ”Corson’s Inlet” and “Tracing Out”; the final section of the .pdf includes a poem from W.S. Merwin, Wendell Berry and two from Joanna Klink. In the interest of time, please focus on Ammons’s poetry and the Scigaj exerpts that precede it first—I’d like for this to be our focus on Tuesday. And if we have time, we might focus on the other poems included to see how they are demonstrating/representing the ideas presented in the Scigaj exerpts. Below, I offer some questions to think about:
ECOPOETICS, the fundamental ideas:
In Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction by J. Scott Bryson, he defines ecopoetry in the following way (drawing from Buell, Scigaj and Gifford): “Ecopoetry is a subset of nature poetry that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues, thus resulting in a version of nature poetry generally marked by three primary characteristics: a) an emphasis on maintaining an ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world (with a devotion to specific places and to the land itself); b) an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and nonhuman nature; and c) an intense skepticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe” (pgs 5-6). How does this definition of what ecopoetics centrally concerns itself with differ from the larger field of ecocriticism and/or how is it similar? How much of this definition suggests a certain level of activisim (that would excite a critic/activist such as Lindholdt)? To what extent do the poems I’ve included here from Ammons, Merwin, Berry and Klink exemplify/demonstrate this definition and its central tenants?
Ecopoets present nature in their poems as a separate and equal other in dialogues meant to include the referential world and offer exemplary models of biocentric perception and behavior, suggesting that both our human origin and the origin of language derive from the natural world and that the natural world is essential for our word-making—this is the idea of référance. What do we make of this? Leo Marx in his essay on Walden suggests that the text is all that there is without the necessity of the referential world (or as Derrida said, “there is nothing outside of the text”), thereby cutting Walden off from the environment. Ecopoets are appalled by this idea and resist it, insisting on, instead, the “self-reflexive recognition of the limits of language” (Scigaj, 38) … my question is, is an ‘original/nature-based’ experience necessary for world- or word-making? To what extent do the poems I’ve selected suggest this necessity and speak to it?
As it says in the section “A Poetry of Referance”, “the ecopoem is a momentary pause for a reconfiguration of perception” (Scigaj, 41) – how then does the ecopoem allow for this reordering of perception? What does that supposed moment of reconfiguration allow for? Is it as Bachelard suggests the opportunity to experience ‘new possibilities’ of language and imagination?
Is the ecopoem too ecocentric? Too first–wave to have any value? What might Buell say about this?
AMMONS’S POETICS:
Ammons once wrote that “poetry is not made out of ‘reality,’ but out of an invented system of signs” and “language, an invented instrument, is not identical with what it points to” – this idea seems to support the ecopoetic position that poststructural language theories have it all wrong, but does this suggest that there can be no outside-text (as Leo Marx insists is the only possibility) because the visible must be intertwined with each poetic act? How does the selection from Garbage speak to these ideas, that is, the necessity of the physical precept or a real referential event?
To complicate things a little, the heavy-weight critic Harold Bloom (a huge fan of Ammons’s work) says that Ammons never wrote ‘nature-poetry’ and that what Ammons calls ‘nature’ is no more natural than Emerson’s Nature was or Whitman’s either and that Ammons is truly a poet of the Romantic Sublime. What is the marked difference here between how Scigaj illustrates Ammons’s work and what Bloom is suggesting? The idea of transcendence that is integral to the sublime – how does that necessitate the natural world or un-necessitate it? Does Ammons’s work suggest transcendence?
“Corson’s Inlet” with its constant flip-flop from internal to referential worlds every few lines seems to underscore the necessity of referentiality (with Marx and Bloom negate). In this poem, Ammons seems to free himself from “separating inside/from outside.” The inner and outer swap around as he permits himself “eddies of meaning” where his “sayings” partake of “swerves of action/like the inlet’s cutting edge.” Can we ascertain from this poem that inner and outer worlds meet in a way that suggests humans are always in experience, not just as dominating exploiters and manipulators, but as partakers of motions and energies that cannot allow for complete/definite separation from the referential real world? Is this poem essentially a poem about direct experience?
Ammons is often posited against poststructural language poets like Hass and Jorie Graham with one of the differences being that Hass and Graham desire to write the gaps between concepts and the referential world—to write an originary language in the flash moment of creation, but some critics suggest that this ends up becoming a safe ‘anthropocentric refuge’ (Scigaj, 115) – is Ammons writing in this gap between concept and referential world or from some other vantage point? And how does the desire for referentiality avoid becoming sheer mimicry?
Note on “Antelope” by Joanna Klink:
In the “notes” section of Klink’s collection of poems, she writes: “Eighty-five antelope fell through thin ice and drowned on January 9, 2004, while moving south across Fort Peck Lake in Valley County, Montana. Antelope have been making the crossing for hundreds of years.
ECOPOETICS, the fundamental ideas:
In Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction by J. Scott Bryson, he defines ecopoetry in the following way (drawing from Buell, Scigaj and Gifford): “Ecopoetry is a subset of nature poetry that, while adhering to certain conventions of romanticism, also advances beyond that tradition and takes on distinctly contemporary problems and issues, thus resulting in a version of nature poetry generally marked by three primary characteristics: a) an emphasis on maintaining an ecocentric perspective that recognizes the interdependent nature of the world (with a devotion to specific places and to the land itself); b) an imperative toward humility in relationships with both human and nonhuman nature; and c) an intense skepticism concerning hyperrationality, a skepticism that usually leads to an indictment of an overtechnologized modern world and a warning concerning the very real potential for ecological catastrophe” (pgs 5-6). How does this definition of what ecopoetics centrally concerns itself with differ from the larger field of ecocriticism and/or how is it similar? How much of this definition suggests a certain level of activisim (that would excite a critic/activist such as Lindholdt)? To what extent do the poems I’ve included here from Ammons, Merwin, Berry and Klink exemplify/demonstrate this definition and its central tenants?
Ecopoets present nature in their poems as a separate and equal other in dialogues meant to include the referential world and offer exemplary models of biocentric perception and behavior, suggesting that both our human origin and the origin of language derive from the natural world and that the natural world is essential for our word-making—this is the idea of référance. What do we make of this? Leo Marx in his essay on Walden suggests that the text is all that there is without the necessity of the referential world (or as Derrida said, “there is nothing outside of the text”), thereby cutting Walden off from the environment. Ecopoets are appalled by this idea and resist it, insisting on, instead, the “self-reflexive recognition of the limits of language” (Scigaj, 38) … my question is, is an ‘original/nature-based’ experience necessary for world- or word-making? To what extent do the poems I’ve selected suggest this necessity and speak to it?
As it says in the section “A Poetry of Referance”, “the ecopoem is a momentary pause for a reconfiguration of perception” (Scigaj, 41) – how then does the ecopoem allow for this reordering of perception? What does that supposed moment of reconfiguration allow for? Is it as Bachelard suggests the opportunity to experience ‘new possibilities’ of language and imagination?
Is the ecopoem too ecocentric? Too first–wave to have any value? What might Buell say about this?
AMMONS’S POETICS:
Ammons once wrote that “poetry is not made out of ‘reality,’ but out of an invented system of signs” and “language, an invented instrument, is not identical with what it points to” – this idea seems to support the ecopoetic position that poststructural language theories have it all wrong, but does this suggest that there can be no outside-text (as Leo Marx insists is the only possibility) because the visible must be intertwined with each poetic act? How does the selection from Garbage speak to these ideas, that is, the necessity of the physical precept or a real referential event?
To complicate things a little, the heavy-weight critic Harold Bloom (a huge fan of Ammons’s work) says that Ammons never wrote ‘nature-poetry’ and that what Ammons calls ‘nature’ is no more natural than Emerson’s Nature was or Whitman’s either and that Ammons is truly a poet of the Romantic Sublime. What is the marked difference here between how Scigaj illustrates Ammons’s work and what Bloom is suggesting? The idea of transcendence that is integral to the sublime – how does that necessitate the natural world or un-necessitate it? Does Ammons’s work suggest transcendence?
“Corson’s Inlet” with its constant flip-flop from internal to referential worlds every few lines seems to underscore the necessity of referentiality (with Marx and Bloom negate). In this poem, Ammons seems to free himself from “separating inside/from outside.” The inner and outer swap around as he permits himself “eddies of meaning” where his “sayings” partake of “swerves of action/like the inlet’s cutting edge.” Can we ascertain from this poem that inner and outer worlds meet in a way that suggests humans are always in experience, not just as dominating exploiters and manipulators, but as partakers of motions and energies that cannot allow for complete/definite separation from the referential real world? Is this poem essentially a poem about direct experience?
Ammons is often posited against poststructural language poets like Hass and Jorie Graham with one of the differences being that Hass and Graham desire to write the gaps between concepts and the referential world—to write an originary language in the flash moment of creation, but some critics suggest that this ends up becoming a safe ‘anthropocentric refuge’ (Scigaj, 115) – is Ammons writing in this gap between concept and referential world or from some other vantage point? And how does the desire for referentiality avoid becoming sheer mimicry?
Note on “Antelope” by Joanna Klink:
In the “notes” section of Klink’s collection of poems, she writes: “Eighty-five antelope fell through thin ice and drowned on January 9, 2004, while moving south across Fort Peck Lake in Valley County, Montana. Antelope have been making the crossing for hundreds of years.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Hunting and Vision in RPW’s Audubon
In order to focus on discussion of Hunting Narratives this week, I’d like to consider Audubon the primary text. If you are pressed for time, please read Audubon first, then the Smith essays on Audubon. It would be nice if we could draw on Roosevelt and Smith’s poems for sake of comparison. In Audubon, overall, in which parts are we dealing with hunting narrative? What does “hunting” consist of in Audubon and how can we apply ecocritical lens to it? In order to allow for the broadest possible interpretations of “hunting” in this poem, I will often not distinguish between hunting, murder, and other acts of or implied violence. The following is a LONG list of questions and thoughts…do with them what you will….
Hunting and Human/Non-human
· How does hunting alter or affect the distinction between our typical binary distinction between human and non-human (animal/natural)?
· How are the often distinct states of “sight” and “thought” (body/mind; senses/reason) either working against each other or unified during acts of hunting/violence? Also, there often seems to be a tendency to acquire a certain degree of narrative distance in acts of violence, where the subject is removed as the agent of the action taking place.
· What is the relationship between eating, hunting, murdering, thinking and seeing (“saw”) in part 2?
· How does hunting stimulate, in the predator’s/hunter’s conscience, a reordering process? In other words, how do the senses, given that present moment—that moment right before killing, reprioritize what is observed by the hunter? (i.e. The teeth are more importantly white / Than has ever been imagined…)
· Does Audubon lead us to believe that hunting is simply a metaphor or that the act of hunting, shooting, killing, actually allows one to transcend human limits of knowledge (Unless. Unless what?)
· When Audubon first sees the Indian’s face (II.D), he sees one eye only, the other eye is his mouth: “From one eye only, the other / An aperture below which blood and mucus hang, thickening slow.” RPW employs a strange synesthesia, mixing up the sites of the senses and their functions. Furthermore, what the eye sees is often more indication of the eye itself, the observer’s consciousness, than the object observed. Aside from lust and hunger, what can we make of the mouth-eye as it relates to hunting? I wonder if this relates in any way to how fuel stems from food and shelter in Thoreau’s economy….Or perhaps we can read hunting, here, as a return to the most primitive mode of being, which although animalistic, might be conceived of as return to nature? Certainly a return to nature in the first-wave sense, however, without any regard for social justice.
The Gun and Present Tense
· What is the role of the gun in Audubon? How is RP Warren using it as a prop? A voice? A motif? How might the Gun be used as mediator, and hunting an act of mediation between human and natural world (I am thinking of Thoreau’s hunters who “stitched the ground in places” where it would otherwise be unstitched…)
· Hunting seems to gain much of its appeal and poignancy from the way it anchors the hunter in the present moment. Yet, hunting narratives are often told in past tense, rather than present tense and that “moment” of killing and death as it occurred physically can only be retold by creating the very context that the moment of hunting—the shot—vanquishes. Hunting moments in Audubon, where he holds or leans on or looks through his gun—where the shot is potential—are told in the present tense. Most all others are not. Verb tense is never more evident that in the second section of Audubon, where A-J is the only section of the poem told in present tense, because it leads up to the “affair.” The act of violence/murder looming keeps Audubon in the present moment, keeps us enclosed in his mind, where there exists a clarity of mind—a “now”—that is in other sections fragmented, dreamed. Section K marks the transition back to the past tense. The omniscient eye previously set in Audubon’s mind, zooms out to see the affair in the context of the larger world. Here, it is only after the implied murder that the reader is given access to context, gravity—the greater ramifications of the narrative. In some ways the act of violence is prerequisite to “coming to” or awareness. We, the audience, can only see afterward, what the man and woman see in the present moment (“and the face / Is, he suddenly sees, beautiful as stone, and / so becomes aware…). Furthermore, when we do see it, we see it much differently (“the affair was not tidy…”).
· While acts of violence may give us context, and divert our attention outward, the gun shot also triggers memory and causes Audubon (and RPW) to turn inward. What does Audubon’s story/Penn warren’s narrative suggest about the relationship between memory (nostalgia) and hunting? See IV where the shot in A brings to life another world recalled in section B. How is the world of memory different from the world (i.e. “Tell me the name of the world”)
Masculinity and Other intersections
· What is to be made of Masculinity and Hunting (“he cannot think what guilt unmans him”) and is it fair to say that the “manly state” = hunter/predatory state in section 2?
· What is to be made of the primitive / uncivilized communication and speech patterns by both Audubon and the woman. Audubon never speaks aloud to the woman, though she speaks to him. He only thinks, or perhaps his thoughts are in dialogue with the Indian he sees in the cabin. What can we make of the Indian—where does he come from, what is he to Audubon, and why is he present in this scene? Is he at all responsible for the murder? Furthermore, how does the Indian and the presence of “manliness”—the societal standards outside the world of the poem—effect Audubon’s actions? (see 2.H)
Hunting and Murder
· How does the description of the murder in II. K compare to hunting narratives? What is more or less “humane” about the murder? How can we use ecocritical perspectives toward the description of murder as a “new dimension of beauty”? How would this relate to romantic notions of beauty and transcendence via nature/primitive modes of being?
· Audubon finds “a new dimension of beauty” in death and killing, and to some extent this beauty is derived from the realization of “the present moment” along with the limits and sufficiency of the self—that by enacting death, one faces and subverts one’s own death. Thus, beauty is an end in itself, an aesthetics that is not necessary congruent with or continuous with ecocritical perspectives?
· To what extent can we read hunting/murder in Audubon as a self-referential act or as metaphor for objectification of the other done for one’s own joy/beauty? See 2.J-L, where in J: “she is what she is”; objectified in K: “the face, like a plum”; self-referential turn in L:”what has been denied me?”
Narrative/Structure/Poetics
· In many sections of the poem, RPW develops a reactionary dynamic where Audubon focuses on and observes an object, and is thereby propelled into “thought” and self-dialogue. Rarely do we see Audubon reacting through actual speech, but rather through interiority/ “thought”, or else, by quiet acts of violence that might or might not take place outside of his mind. To what extent can we treat hunting (and murder) scenes/references in Audubon as narrative, as opposed to metaphor? I wonder how our answer to this question is affected by the poem’s biographical foundation—that the poem asks us to begin our reading with a real man who is already, before our reading, a construction in our minds. It seems we could talk exhaustively about this poem without the first reference to hunting, on the other hand, we might read the entire poem (perhaps beginning with the first instance of the word “saw” in the second stanza) as one long hunting narrative constructed by Penn Warren. In the first page of “Warren’s Ventriloquist”, Smith catalogues a number of different critical approaches to Warren’s poetic form in Audubon. For Smith, Audubon is “a poem of lyric voice performing narrative tasks” (61). What on earth does this mean? I think, in some ways, Buell’s world-making applies here. Penn Warren seems to be primarily concerned with rendering a world unbound by temporal and spatial constraints, and certainly not dependent on the “true story” of a man for whom there is no such thing. In some regards, Audubon is perhaps a logical alibi for Penn Warren to tell his own personal narrative without the highly unfashionable personal pronoun. In any case, if we think of the story as a created environment, it seems there might be something in common with how RPW uses Audubon, Poe uses Pym, and Thoreau uses Walden, Bachelard uses nests and shells. Perhaps one way to apply ecocriticism to these “environments” is to first ask whether it is a means to understanding or connecting the self and “other” realms, or whether it is a rubber stamp, whereby objectification, abstraction, anthropomorphism apply. In Poe, we talked a lot about how nature often seemed to be simply a backdrop—a means to heighten interiority—Poe’s primary environment. More extreme, perhaps, is Bachelard, who certainly extracts shells and nests from nature for the sake of metaphor and the higher meanings he attaches to them as his own intellectual property. In Thoreau, it might be said that Walden is very much a necessary means to and an integral part of his intellectual journey rather than a convenient vehicle for his metaphor (certainly, one could argue against this too). What happens in a poem where the primary environment is Audubon? Can a person’s life (biographical info/art/myth, etc…) be the environment for a text, and to what extent can the author’s handling of this environment—his “vision” be viewed ecocritically? How is “Audubon” by Robert Penn Warren or “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” by Poe—by their very titles and premises—like anthropomorphizing of nature—one man assuming the voice of a thing he cannot speak for?
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