ESSAY

As John Burnside and Maurice Riordan reflect in the Wild Reckoning introduction, “Rachel Carson did not want to write Silent Spring, the book for which she is now best know” (15).  She had proposed that others write articles detailing the destruction caused by the use of pesticides.  She didn’t feel that she was the right person for the job, but when no one else stepped up, she set forth to do it herself, “When nobody emerged she set to work, knowing that it would cost her far too much in time and effort. But ‘there would be no peace for me’, she said, ‘if I kept silent” (16).  They conclude that Carson’s style—much more lyrical and sentimental than a scientific writer—may very well be the reason why she was the perfect person to write Silent Spring, “What her work proposes, and what it achieves, is a new form of ecology; a science of belonging, a science founded as much on appreciation and lyricism as on observation and precision—a science, then, that shares a lot of common ground with poetry” (19).

           

I believe, in so much as I have witnessed, that this belonging and appreciation for nature must be intentionally fostered in order to build a conscious world community that is prepared to care for all of creation, and that poetry can aid in bringing people back to the land to find the spirit within themselves that provides that connection.

           

Our society’s general lack of connection to nature is not just the product of our current fast hold to technological advancement.  I have heard many people say that they do not need to go to a church because it is more powerful for them to experience the presence of a greater entity by being outside in nature.  Do these people actually then devote time to regularly go outside to experience the divine?  I do not know, but I do know that for centuries, other groups of people have held firmly to the belief that this cannot be true and that this idea must be squelched. Kate Rigby discusses this idea in Topographies of the Sacred and further details the roots of our detachment from “place.”

           

Rigby rolls back to a story from the eight century with the Christianization of the German people.  It is said that to dispel the pagan Saxton beliefs that destroying nature would unleash a fury of undesirable events, the Christian missionaries fell a sacred oak tree.  When nothing happened as a result, Rigby paraphrases from Freud’s The Future of an Illusion saying that, “at this moment, in this place, for these people, the gods began to take leave of the earth” (54).  She continues that the purpose of the tree and the possibilities of man’s status on this earth was redefined as a result, “Reconceived as merely material, the once-sacred oak could now be appropriated as an object for use, retaining its aura of inherent value only as a manifestation of God’s handiwork and a mythical trace in the archives of cultural memory” (Rigby 55).  As the role of the tree shifts, so to does the entire regard for the forest.  Men then can make claims on land and our dominance over this earth is truly enacted, “Land, as space rather than place, loses its telos and tends toward the condition of a blank page, awaiting inscription according to the needs—or fashion—of the day” (Rigby 61).  The harmful result of this mindset has snowballed over centuries, and finds itself as one of the biggest topics of current conversation, “We are now beginning to experience in the depths of our bodies the insupportable price of our attempted domination of nature.” (Rigby 67).

           

In Writing for an Endangered World, Lawrence Buell calls for “space” to become “place” again, “The more a site feels like a place, the more fervently it is so cherished, the greater the potential concern at its violation or even the possibility of violation” (56).  He continues by acknowledging the power of art in this process, “…artists who take it upon themselves to think intently about place can be instructive witnesses to its influence, although of course there is no guarantee that art will itself altogether shake free of the ground condition of place obliviousness.” (61).  With books such as Wild Reckoning and poets like Wendell Berry, there is no question as to whether artists of poetry have been willing to take up this challenge.  As Rigby explains, poets can use their craft to shift the perspective on place.  Commenting on John Clare’s “The Lamentations of Round-Oak Waters,” she says that “It is, rather, an invitation to the reader to consider the plight of place itself, along with the suffering of those, human and otherwise, for whom it had hitherto provided pleasure, shelter, and sustenance…Clare repositions the place as subject rather than scene” (Rigby 58).  Having established that poetry that speaks to the struggles of the earth as a result of man’s actions readily exist, the question then becomes how these poems can aid in the call to action suggested in Silent Spring.

           

Through EarthWalk, I found that reading and writing poetry before, during and after my experience helped to sculpt my sense of “place,” and thereby rekindled my desire to connect more deeply with nature and to speak and act on her behalf.  As Rigby holds, (in reflection of Clare’s words) “the land needs defenders to plead its case within human society” (59).

           

On my way to Vermont to engage in the Goddard College Education Program Residency and the EarthWalk Institute, I listened to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and was subsequently inspired and able to make a short stop at Walden Pond in Massachusetts.  As I listened to Thoreau’s commentary on building and living in a small cabin in the woods and on life in general, I was struck with not only a great desire to go outside and “test” the things he was saying, but also with a grand sense of connection.  My connection to his words was so great that I had to do a double take—making sure that I was indeed listening to Thoreau’s Walden and that it was written in the mid 1800’s.  It seems as though the simplest parts of life and nature, though they may change greatly for us in the short-term, are relatively the same as they were back then.  This sense of shared connection and desire to physically explore what is found in a book is not all that surprising, but, I believe, is not acted upon and appreciated nearly enough.

           

Thoreau so insightfully captured every bit of experience that he could.  In describing the space where his cabin set he says, 

            This was an airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess

            might trail her garments.  The winds which passed over my dwelling were such as sweep over the

            ridges of mountains, bearing the broken strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music.  The

            morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear

            it (62).  

With the soft hum of the air conditioner spewing cold air in my face, as I heard these words I longed to stand on a mountain and to listen, feel and taste the wind.  I also read excerpts from Thoreau’s Walden journals that had been juxtaposed with photographs by Eliot Porter in a 1962 Sierra Club book. 

January 7,1852 details:

            Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour,

            in such light as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn,

            and the curtain falls.

            And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.

            And then the damask curtains glow along the western window.

            And now the first star is lit, and I go home.

When I lived in the city I hardly thought about the fact that I rarely viewed magnificent sunsets, but now that I live in a rural town, they will often catch me unaware and hold my gaze and wonderment.  The sentiment is short lived; I will often leave to refocus my mind before the pale pinks have faded. Reading Thoreau’s intentionality in capturing and vocalizing the event of a sunset, however, makes wish that I could conjure a sunset right now—to view it with the new lens that has been afforded to me by Thoreau’s reflection.  Spending time with Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond prior to my own intentional partake in the simplicity of living with the land, afforded me the time and inspiration to next enter the woods with questions and heightened senses.  As I traversed the wooded trail that snaked around the pond to reach the believed site of Thoreau’s cabin, I felt myself intentionally blocking out the activity of the people who were splashing in the water to my left.  Instead, I tried to focus on the connection I shared with the people in plain clothes that passed me on the trail and those who had placed stones on the pile near the outlined site of the cabin—we didn’t need to talk to notice that we shared a commonality.  We were seeking to catch a glimpse for ourselves—with all our senses—some fraction of the experience Thoreau had shared with us with words.  Next to the stone columns that marked the perimeter of where the small cabin had likely stood was a sign that read Thoreau’s intention for having lighted upon this space:

            “I WENT TO THE WOODS BECAUSE

            I WISHED TO LIVE DELIBERATELY,           

            TO FRONT ONLY THE ESSENTIAL

            FACTS OF LIFE.

            AND SEE IF I COULD

            NOT LEARN WHAT IT HAD TO TEACH

            AND NOT, WHEN I CAME TO DIE,

            DISCOVER THAT I HAD NOT LIVED.”

It was my decision to move to a town on a river with a bridge that offers majestic views of the western mountains.  It was my decision to walk across the bridge after dinner to fetch my mail at the post office on the other side.  I said before that sometimes sunsets bestow themselves upon me.  It is true, that I have never left my door seeking a sunset, but I must also acknowledge that I have positioned myself in a place where it is easier than when I lived among buildings in Cleveland for the sunsets to make an appearance in my every day life.  It isn’t just a coincidence; I set myself up for it.  In A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver makes a similar claim about poetry.

           

She says that to write poetry—to allow poetry to emerge—one must be intentional about arranging the time and space for this to happen (Oliver 8).  The mere desire to form a poem isn’t enough.  This isn’t to say that writing a poem can’t be spontaneous, but that most often it is not.  I think of it like viewing wildlife: the people who are most likely to have seen a particularly shy animal are likely the ones who have spent a great deal of days having not seen the animal, but spending time in its habitat searching for clues to make a sighting more likely.  Time doesn’t guarantee an amazing product, but experience has shown that it does offer a greater likelihood that one will be produced.

           

Coupling with time to foster the production of good poems, is the simple action of reading poems.  Oliver says, “Good poems are the best teachers” (10). She speaks of my experience with Walden saying that we shouldn’t be surprised when we are able to connect with poets of the past since the things that concern us in life have remained relatively the same (Oliver 11). While at the EarthWalk institute, I read a good many poems.  I had hoped that this would immediately lead to a motivation to write poetry.  I found, however, that two things initially prevented this from coming to fruition: my desire to experience my surroundings and a lack of solitude.

           

If I could have erected a sheet of glass to hang placidly in front of me as I gazed through the pine forest, over the grassy meadow or down to the stones of the river I would have surely done this and written inspiring poetry upon it.  My spiral notebook, however, did not offer such transparency.  I wanted to just look and be—flipping through and writing upon clean, crisp sheets of paper seemed sacrilegious, or maybe it would have been a homecoming.  Responding to a question on the future of nature writing in an interview with Courtney Algeo in the Twin Cities Daily Planet, poet John Caddy declares that people are finally reconnecting with nature, “A lot of people are gradually realizing that we are nature and that our longing and our hopes reside there in many ways. We're even afraid of what's been natural within us for a long time…”  Multiple times I felt that I needed to immerse myself as fully as possible in the greenery around me and that there was no way that I could effectively capture the experience in words.  The thought of writing poetry wasn’t altogether lost as it might seem that I am implying, but rather while in nature I was taking in notes that could contribute to a later poem.  Reading poetry while sitting among the trees and hearing the squabbles of the squirrels gave me greater clarity in what notes to take.  Unlike prose, I found it quite easy to read a few lines and then take a break to glance around and search for a physical manifestation of the passage.  Having a book about nature and taking it out didn’t have the same effect for me as a blank notebook—rather it helped me to connect to my surroundings.

           

I was particularly inspired one day while sitting on the banks of the Winooski River.  We’d just hiked down through the woods in the heat and had been barefoot, so I needed a break before venturing out into the river to the beach on the other side to search for animal tracks.  I pulled out Wild Reckoning and flipped to “The Marshes of Glynn” by Sidney Lanier.  A fellow language arts educator sat down next to me and asked if I’d read the poem aloud.  I did and stopped at the end of the first page and we talked about what we’d read.  The style was tricky at first.  There were words not common to our everyday language and sometimes the rhyming scheme was either forced or awkward.  Still, in navigating together, we pushed through the thickets of word and rhyme just as we had done in the forest to reach the stony beach where we sat.  By the second page I was on a roll and convinced that a lack of physical sound was part of the reason that I had failed to get past the first page when I’d tried reading it a few days prior. The words flowed beautifully and the alliteration fostered the rise of a sweet churning in my heart.  Of the second page, we spoke of the author and the way his images (“the beachlines linger and curl / As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows the / firm sweet limbs of a girl.) were played out before us as the river wound itself around quick turns.  Though I was excited to be sharing this experience with Per, by the third page I wondered how much longer this poem would continue.  I delicately surveyed my feeling that we were doing something so odd and artsy that a charge of questioners might come peering through the marsh grass behind us at any moment, or even that our comrades who were scampering about looking at animal tracks might think us funny for reading poetry aloud.  We’re English teachers!  Why should I feel awkward about reading a poem?  I think it is partially because most of the time when I’ve heard poems read aloud it is either in a sterile classroom or by way of a distant microphone on a dark bar stage.  I allowed these thoughts only a moments pause and instead declared my delight for Lanier’s phrase, “Softly the sand-beach wavers away to a dim gray looping of light.”  We remarked on our location with the woods behind us and the water and an expanse of sky in front, similar to what Lanier was describing.  As Lanier expressed his thankfulness for the freedom afforded by his experience I felt as if he were actually joining Per and I in that moment.  In closing our reflection on the last page of the piece, we spoke of the continuity of change Lanier describes.  From the woods that lead to the marsh to the light as it traverses through the day-long sky, he carefully pulls these threads through and weaves a story that has a clear sense of time and place, but not in a “this-now” and “that-then” kind of way.  Rather, it was a beautiful symphony with melodies booming loudly at parts and remaining soft in the background at others.  Part of what I enjoyed most was sitting next to Per and looking forward to the scene before us as we spoke.  We were simultaneous critics of the landscape and painters of the experience.  We were together in the work, but left the formal face-to-face encounter of communication in our society to find its home elsewhere.  I then asked Per if he’d like to read aloud a poem from the book.  Instead, he opted to read me a poem he’d written the day before. Here I was, connecting with another person and with nature in new, beautiful and authentic way. Having such rich experiences in reading poetry in nature, I found great solace and understanding in Mary Oliver’s remarks about the necessity of solitude to actually write poetry.

           

With a lot of knowledge to learn from one another it wasn’t surprising how much time we spent together as a group, but for writing poetry, the schedule was stifling. Our EarthWalk Institute days were filled with playing games and practicing wilderness and naturalist skills.  In the evening we shared insights and stories around the fire. I felt like I needed quiet and space to write and that isolating myself from the group might rob me of a better experience.  I suffered from, as my friend calls it: FOMS (Fear Of Missing Something).  One might argue that I could have equally missed out on something by not intentionally creating the alone time needed to write poetry, but my desire to learn from and be with the group prevailed.  I didn’t beat myself up over this, and I believe that Mary Oliver would have supported me in the cause, provided that I did honestly make the effort to provide myself with the space and time to write at some point.  “It is no use thinking that the writing of poems—the actual writing—can accommodate itself to a social setting” she says (Oliver 116).  Her reasoning is that the poem, as it runs through the author’s mind and to the paper, can’t be interrupted, “I don’t mean that it won’t but that it can’t” (Oliver 117).  The only poem that I wrote while actually out in the woods was “Birds and Berries” and that was done in tandem with Per.  Still, he and I were intentional about making the time to do it and once we started we didn’t allow anything to interrupt us—try as the noisy red squirrel did, he merely provided added inspiration.  I’m happy that I took notes, but didn’t write much while at the Institute.  This offered me the ability to seize the opportunities in the present and to engage in intentional reflection upon returning home.

           

As had been the case when reading “The Marshes of Glynn” for the second time, approaching again the books of poems I had selected to read when I returned home deepened my understanding and appreciation for these works.  This experience, within the walls of my scantly furnished yet cozy apartment after returning from five days on the land, offered me the opportunity to add another layer of meaning and memory to what I had learned at EarthWalk.

           

For a relatively young person, my memory isn’t the best so as we learned plant identification I had to resolve myself to choosing just a few varieties to intentionally focus on.  The three I chose—yarrow, plantain and sorrel—were because of their widespread availability, medicinal uses and, in the case of sorrel, the flavor.  I had heard of sorrel before, but only knew it from a friend’s garden.  I had no idea that it grew in an equally delicious wild form.  Yarrow and plantain on the other hand were new to me would be harder for me to remember.  Imagine my delight when I re-read the following lines from Eric Pankey’s Metaphor:

  
To capture the morning

         Along the washed-out town road

above  a slope too steep to grow crops

  he shoveled up this tangle

        of weeds and grasses –

    each separate, clustered:

         feathery shoots of yarrow,

dandelion florets closed tight above

      their jagged damp leaves, cocksfoot,

            spare spikes of heath rush

     and fleshy plantain.

           

Recognizing these plants and rejoicing in Pankey’s descriptions not only inspired me to keep reading, but it also added another memory to each the yarrow and plantain files of my mind, thereby increasing the likelihood that I would remember them. This new familiarity with the subject matter of these poems allowed me to further identify and study the poetic devices that enrich and propel them. 

           

As always in writing, each word should serve a purpose for being summoned to the sentence, but I feel that this holds even more truth for poetry and an even greater distinction for nature poetry.  Yes, it is sometimes beneficial to send the reader on a quest to discover the meaning of a word, but when using names and terms that limit the accessibility of the poem the poet endangers the later lines of the poem—meaning that the reader may abandon the piece before reaching them.  I’m not saying that poems should be dumbed down, but that prior knowledge is necessary for the full meaning to be discovered.  Finding more words, feelings and descriptions that I could relate to after immediately having been in nature, I became more aware of the place these words had in the poem and the form they took.  The diction, or selection of these words, became increasingly apparent to me and the result was magical.  In referring to poor word choice, Mary Oliver cautions, “And nothing kills a poem more quickly—for the poem, if it works at all, works as a statement that is experienced by the imagination, eliciting real rather than conditioned responses” (88).

           

After revisiting some and discovering other poems and connecting with them on a deeper level, I found the process of reading to inform my writing in a much stronger way than it had before.  I experienced Mary Oliver’s claim that “Good poems are the best teachers” (11).  Her advice also extended to how I allowed these poems to guide my writing and the way I sought to capture and share my EarthWalk experience through poetry.

           

Oliver is pleasantly firm in her belief that good poets do not achieve such acclaim because they are naturals, but because they have spent time imitating, reflecting and revising.  As Oliver says, “You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate” (14). When we are truly seeking to understand we aren’t merely copying, but we are looking to capture the way we see someone else doing thing well by repeating it and adding our own twist.  It is a natural and comfortable way to learn, but it isn’t fostered as well as it could be in writing, “Every child is encouraged to imitate.  But in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins” (11).  To make both my exploration of eco-poetry and my EarthWalk experience more meaningful, I practiced writing my own poems and sought to imitate what I read and liked.

           

None of the poems I read had been written about the woods where I had camped, but I was able to draw great connection from their imagery and form.  My chief goal as I wrote was to also create poems that were specific yet universal.  While trying to write in the woods I ran into the problem of feeling like I couldn’t possibly capture the scene before me with any shred of accuracy.  This feeling, combined with a desire to write accessible poems, worked well for me in that I was not writing in the moment when I returned home, but as a reflection of the experience. Oliver suggests that, “Poems begin in experience, but are not in fact experience, not even a necessarily exact reportage of an experience” (109-110).  She claims that poems are their own entities, “They are imaginative constructs, and they do not exist to tell us about the poet or the poet’s actual experience” (110).  She remarks, “Loyalty to the actual experience—whatever got the poem started—is not necessarily helpful; often it is a hindrance” (110).  This line of thinking, especially in creating eco-poems, was helpful for me in allowing the freedom I needed to express the thoughts of my heart and the work of my brain.  Recognizing this transformative process for an idea as it morphs through the stages of experience, inspiration and application, is, I believe, the quest of the eco-poet.

           

Yes, I came to this experience having already read Silent Spring and having a love for nature, but reading and writing eco-poetry has taken me firmly by the hand, guided me back to the land and rekindled the burning fire in my heart to protect our natural environment.  Unlike the negative and finger-pointing style of many popular social commentaries, nature and eco-poetry holds a gentler, but grander place in inviting people back to the world that sustains them.  It enhances the experience; thereby allowing it to throw lead ropes into the future and invites a careful and personal opinion as a reflective practice.  Oliver alludes to the familiarity and curiosity of nature saying that, “The natural world is the old river that runs through everything, and I think poets will forever fish along its shores” (106). 

           

I embarked on this eco-poetry experience not because—in Carson’s case—no one else would do it, but because working with poetry and reconnecting to my eco-passions was something that needed to happen for me, and I was the only person who could take up that challenge.  Hopefully others will rise to take up their own challenges and we can all head to the river together—before there are no more fish to catch.

___

Algeo, Courtney. “Talking with poet and naturalist John Caddy, winner of the 2012 McKnight Distinguished

     Artist Award.” Twin Cities Daily Planet. 16 May 2012. Web. 24 July 2012.

Burnside, John, Maurice Riordan.Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

     London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004. Print.

Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.s. and

     Beyond. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. Print.

Lanier, Sidney. “The Marshes of Glynn.” Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent

     Spring. Ed. Burnside, John, Maurice Riordan. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004. 103. Print.

Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1994. Print.

Pankey, Eric. “Metaphor.” Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Ed.

     Burnside, John, Maurice Riordan. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004. 88. Print.

Rigby, Kate. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism. Charlottesville:

     University of Virginia press, 2004. Print.

Thoreau, Henry D, and Eliot Porter. In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World, from Henry David Thoreau.

     San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1962. Print.

Thoreau, Henry D. Walden: Or, Life in the Woods : And, on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. New York: New

     American Library, 1960. Print.