ecology – Poetry Owl

Note: This post is a slightly revised version of an essay written for the course, Place in Modern Poetry and Prose: Locality, Environment, Community and Exile, run by Oxford Department for Continuing Education and taught by Giles Goodland. A useful video of Sheri Benning talking about her book can be found at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBtJpcKoTLE and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5yZPj8U4K4

The promise of the New World to those arriving from the old was the possibility of space, of horizons thrillingly distant, in the prairie lands of the USA and Canada. Sheri Benning is a Canadian poet who writes about Saskatchewan while Carrie Etter, from the USA, sets her poems in Illinois.

Etter traces the etymology of ‘prairie’ in the first poem in the second section of The Weather in Normal linking it to Arcadia and eclogue, before declaring that ‘Illinoisians were never raised for hills’

prairie the horizon the very edge of the world ^[1]

For her, the prairie of Illinois is the location of home and of an idealised, almost prelapsarian childhood, preserved in memory and language, ‘you’re merely there in imagination’. ^[2] Although one of the purposes of the book is to highlight the threat to the ecology of Illinois from climate change, its imaginative focus is on the recreation of home in language. In this second section of the book, in particular, she itemizes the details of her childhood home, giving it a figurative structure and resonance reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

upstairs the bedrooms

downstairs including

the crawl space under the house

a world of mice & spiders & cats

you refused to risk it

may have been the house’s core

the absence holding up so much presence^[3]

The poem on the page has the shape of a house, with the right and left margins justified to create the solidities of the walls, and the three-storey structure reminding us of Bachelard’s concept of ‘verticality’, ‘the polarity of cellar and attic’.^[4] The importance of the crawl space as a feared and unvisited but important place echoes Bachelard’s description of the cellar, as ‘the dark entity of the house’^[5], which connects us to ‘the entire earth behind its walls’^[6]; it is the site of irrationality and, following Jung, the unconscious which is a source for imagination.

The three parts of this collection take us from a memorial to the poet’s parents in section one, to the home at the centre of memory and imagination in section two, and from there outwards to the threatened space of Illinois where the house is located. Section two has its own sense of movement towards and away from the centre as it moves from the prairie to the house where the poet conducts an imaginary inventory before finally being able to leave and yield ownership to the new residents:

so leave as a familiar might out the back

open the glass door into twilight

& walk toward the absent poplars^[7]

It is as though she needs to reiterate her history in this childhood place in order to grow up. Etter has not actually lived in Illinois since she was 19, so what she describes in these poems is very much her ‘first universe’ her place of ‘being-well’.^[8] When she has recreated and preserved this place in language, she is ready to confront the realities of Illinois now, in the time of climate change. In the poems in Section 3, she simultaneously recognises her kinship with the flora and fauna of the prairie, ‘I am animal // amid’^[9] while accepting human responsibility for the damage done to the eco-system,

am animal amid animals—

and I annihilate.

I, the world’s curse.)^[10]

In the final poem, which returns to the open spaces of the prairie, ‘common, cornstalk & flatland’, paradoxically she returns to centre, to the body, to the song in the body which she has earned, the body of the place and the body which is her own:

a song in the body, the body in Illinois

The vision of the land and the nature of home seems darker and more oppressive in Sheri Benning’s Field Requiem, overshadowed by the destruction caused by agribusiness, by the weight of Catholic liturgy and the desperate struggle to survive of the early farmers, many of whom were immigrants from Eastern Europe. Behind this burden of history lurks another guilt-stained shadow, the displacement of indigenous peoples which although rarely explicit in the poems is mentioned in the notes: ‘The Dominion Lands Act effectively granted free land to settlers as part of a process that displaced Indigenous and Métis peoples from their traditional homes.’^[11] Benning herself grew up on a small farm and the book, on one level, mourns the loss of this home which was sold, like so many others, when her parents could no longer compete with agro-industry: ‘Hailstorm, flood, drought. / Interest rates. Debt loads. Go big, or // get out.’^[12] However, although the poet is personally connected to the matter of her poems, she is not engaged in an exercise of memory. She says explicitly, at the end of ‘Compline’:

These are not my memories. Unless

Memory is what we call the longed-for.

What did not come to pass.

She reinforces this idea at the opening of Section III where she quotes Eavan Boland: ‘I am writing this/not to recall our lives, / but to imagine them.’^[13]

She is engaged in a process of commemoration, whereby she uses imagination to help her record and create a history of the community she grew up in. The importance of accurate record is reinforced by the photographs of derelict homes, taken by her sister, Heather Benning, and by the map references used as titles for several poems. Like an archaeologist, the poet puts together forgotten lives from these scraps of evidence. In Benning’s work, the safety of the house and the possibility of ‘well-being’ seem infinitely precarious. Babies die: in ‘Vespers’, which may be an elegy for a grandmother of great-grandmother, she addresses the protagonist: ‘Oldest daughter, you prepared your sisters/for earth, wiped vernix from fists and eyes.’ This woman is now buried off ‘Highway 5’ in a graveyard surrounded by the ugliest features of intensive agriculture. Only in imagination can the family rebury her in the same place as her sisters: We’ll gather in dusk’s blue hour, take up your bones,/walk through mist and cricket throb rising / from sloughs, the pasture’s low spots,// deliver you to the braid of your sisters.’ There are references to illness, hunger, poverty and horrific farm accidents. Yet, at the same time, there are epiphanic moments, all the more precious for their momentariness. In ‘Nativity’ an ironically titled poem she celebrates probably a parent’s recovery from surgery and a walk in the snow which seems like rebirth: ‘Snow, a cool chrism/ on last season’s wounds. You laughed // as a child can, unburdened,/ face to sky…’^[14]

The centrepiece of this volume is Section IV, ‘Let them Rest’, a long sequence with the suitably bleak epigraph ‘Dies irae, dies illa / solvet saeclum in favilla’, which reconstructs the stories of vanished farming families whilst confronting the devastation to the land caused by the chemical pesticides and fertilizers and the major agri-businesses.

Farm subsidies smashed by Intercontinental Packers,

Big Sky Pork Farms. Our barns now their finishing

pens for 10 000 pigs from 1000 sows.

No moon. No snow. No yard-lights for miles,

like an eye put out.^[15]

We could compare these lines about a farm, possibly the poet’s own, which has been sold to the more comforting vision of Bachelard: ‘The lamp in the window is the house’s eye and, in the kingdom of the imagination, it is never lighted out-of-doors, but is enclosed light, which can only filter to the outside…. By means of the light in that far-off house, the house sees, keeps vigil, vigilantly waits.’^[16] Benning has extinguished the lights and undermined the possibility of the house or home in this sequence which is so clearly of the last days. In ‘Zephaniah’ she lists threatened species and attributes blame:

Ferruginous Hawk,

Black-tailed Prairie Dog,

Bobolink, longspurs, pipits,

Swift Fox, Whip-por-whirl,

Piping Plover, Whooping Crane,

Sage Grouse. We were warned:

Fish, fowl, animal.

And they who weigh silver,

merchants and traders?^[17]

In one of the final poems in the sequence where she describes a gruesome subterranean feast in the grave, ‘St Scholastica’s fall Supper, six feet deep in the earth’, she may cast the blame more widely: ‘Don’t mention the bread was salted with tears./ Don’t mention the bowlfuls and bowlfuls of tears.’^[18] This could be a reference to the displacement of the indigenous peoples, which is picked up again in Section 5 of the book: ‘Where coyotes licked the blood/of those whose land you broke, they’ll lick yours’^[19]

It would be wrong to characterise this collection as being all gloom and doom. In its passionate depiction of the farmlands of Saskatchewan and its anguish at what is happening to them, this poetry is powerful, invigorating and challenging. Like Etter, the poet returns repeatedly to the imagined home:

When they ask, where is your place? The slough

in the field west of our barns, stubble and dirt

loosened from frost, furred willows,

frog chorus, the coyotes’ dusk antiphonal,

a bell’s tongue in bone marrow. These things

I remember as I pour out my soul.^[20]

However, she never forgets that she is writing about what is past and the last line in the book is:

There is no going back.^[21]

Both Etter and Benning, in their representation of prairie spaces, are attempting in their poetry to be ‘equal to the real itself’ as required by Charles Olson, himself a mapper of spaces. However, Etter approaches her vision of Illinois through the prism of her childhood memories and her current understanding of ecological crisis, whereas Benning seeks to create a reality which will answer or be equal to the experiences of the voiceless immigrant farmers who struggled to subsist in the prairies of Saskatchewan. Both poets express a sense of ecological loss, an awareness of the destruction of environment through human agency, although Etter seems to take some of the blame upon herself while Benning turns her guns on industrial farming practices.

^[1] Etter, p.25

^[2] Ibid., p.27

^[3] Ibid.p.37

^[4] The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, 1964; Penguin Classics, 2014, p.39

^[5] Ibid. p.39

^[6] Ibid. p.41

^[7] Etter, p.41

^[8] Bachelard, p.26, p.28.

^[9] Etter, p.51

^[10] Ibid., p.65

^[11] Benning, p.89

^[12] Ibid.,p.16

^[13] Ibid.,p.41

^[14] Ibid., p.32

^[15] Ibid., p.75

^[16] Bachelard, p.54

^[17] Benning, p.71

^[18] Ibid., p.79

^[19] Ibid. p.86

^[20] Ibid., ‘Viaticum’, p.84

^[21] Ibid., ‘To Glasgow’, p.87

I did not manage to attend Alice Oswald’s first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry but I have just listened to the podcast: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/art-erosion . The title of the lecture was ‘The Art of Erosion’ and in it Oswald made a distinction between poetry which builds up and that which erodes, the latter being what she is more interested in. Erosion as a metaphor captures the forces of nature and time central to her poetry. She argues that the poetry of erosion is not a construct but the uncovering or discovering of what is already there. Poets (and critics) are fond of dividing poetry into categories; this one reminds me of Charles Olson’s dictum that the poet could either make something up or be ‘equal to the real, itself’. This, in turn, reminds me of Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy, and, more significantly for Oswald, of Keats’ discussion of the egotistical sublime and the chameleon poet.

In her lecture, Oswald chose to quote poetic extracts concerned with nature and time, from Wyatt through Herrick to Wordsworth and back to Homer. She blithely dismissed five out of six stanzas of the Wyatt poem as being ‘love poetry’ while she analysed and treasured the first few lines which capture the process of erosion:

Processe of tyme worketh suche wounder,

That water which is of kynd so sot

Doth perse the marbell stone a sonder,

By little droppes faling from aloft.

I am not sure how well Oswald’s distinction works as a critical theory and she lost me when she appeared to contrast the way Wordsworth wrote about Nature with Herrick’s writing. I feel her theory is more of an enabling myth which underpins her own approach to writing poetry and which particularly works in relation to her sea poem, Nobody. This book-length work was commissioned to accompany watercolours by William Tillyer and was originally published with the watercolours as an art book. However, it has been edited and republished as a successful stand-alone poem. We recognise many elements from Oswald’s other work. Like Memorial with which this might be paired, the one as Oswald’s take on the Iliad, this as her version of the Odyssey, the poem reflects her enduring interest in the classics. It is also, like Dart and A Sleepwalk on the Severn, an ecological poem, a poem about landscape or waterscapes and people, about Nature and culture. In her writing, the individual “I” does not disappear, but becomes the recording eye, the listening ear open and receptive to everything in the location. This is Keats’ ‘negative capability’ which leads to the view of himself as a ‘chameleon poet’, who

has no identity – he is continually in for, and filling, some other body- the sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.

Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818

keats

The central figure in Nobody is similarly ‘nobody’ – a poet, the nameless poet exiled by Clytemnestra and Aegistheus, or even our poet, Alice Oswald, taking on different shapes like the sea god Proteus in order to convey the shifting shapes and times of the sea and the myths and histories with which it is imbued.

NOBODY

One would probably require a greater knowledge of Greek mythology, Homer and the classics than I have to pick up all the allusions in the poem. Helpfully, most of the relevant names are printed in grey uppercase at the end of the book and it does not take too much effort to look them up and revise their stories. However, the stories and figures all belong to the island-spattered Mediterranean and Aegean seas, so that the poem has a specific location.

In her lecture, Oswald was excited by poetry which captured the passage of time and the changes of the seasons, in particular, by poems which seemed to capture the effect of a natural force through time, which actually recorded the process of erosion, rather like those nature films where the budding and flowering of a plant are speeded up so that we can see them happening. In Nobody the writing seeks to be open to the fluctuation of the sea, so that the voice is constantly changing its identity, sometimes perhaps the poet ‘I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once/ with the oddest verdigris expression’, perhaps Odysseus:

a blue came over us a blue cloud

whose brown shadow goose-fleshed the sea

the ship after a little rush stopped moving

the wind with a swivelling sound began to rise

and here I am still divided in my decision

whether to heave-to or keep going under half-sail

but the water is in my thinking now

We may notice the exactitude and incidental brilliance of Oswald’s writing – ‘verdigris’ the grey-green coating of brass exposed to damp, ‘goose-fleshed’, an emotive but precise description of a change in the sea’s surface, while at the same time recognising that as the water is in the thinking of Odysseus so it is also in the thinking of the poem.

Oswald is much preoccupied with simile, particularly Homeric simile, a device she used structurally in Memorial; the similes in this poem are also remarkable, often pulling the stories and myths of the past into the present: the stranded poet paces ‘dry as an ashtray’; later a swimmer floats ‘like a wedge of polystyrene’; seals ‘bob about like footballs’. Such similes contribute to our feeling that past and present coexist in the constant change and movement of sea water.

This book-length poem makes excellent use of the printed page and white space. However, Oswald is a poet who writes for the voice and the ear. I have never heard her read her own work, but in the lecture it was notable how she read each of her quotations at least twice, allowing her voice to caress the words and phrases. The way this poem is set out allows us to guess at how it should sound, where the voice should linger, where it should gather pace and momentum.

In her lecture, Oswald remarked that Herrick was a minor poet, whereas Homer was a major one. She suggested that the difference lay in the fact that Homer (if he actually existed) had a single or unified vision while Herrick did not. Whether or not this distinction holds, we could recognise that Oswald writes from a single vision; she is a poet of ecology. There are many things she does not write about and her determined openness to landscape and waterscape, her commitment to her way of poetry have a rigour which may sometimes seem almost dispassionate or inhuman. I think this is because she displays the quality of ‘negative capability’ and the subordination of personal identity to such an extraordinary extent. Although, of course, she is the shaping force or maker of this poem, she manages to make it seem as if she were merely a conduit for the voices and forces of the sea. Thus it is fittingly titled Nobody.

Tag: ecology

Prairie spaces: a discussion of the representation of space, place and home in Field Requiem (Carcanet, 2021) by Sheri Benning and The Weather in Normal (Station Hill Press, New York, 2018) by Carrie Etter.

Alice Oswald’s first Oxford lecture and her recent collection, Nobody