Ellen Stone, me, Teresa Scollon, Alison Swan
Last weekend I made my first foray into the world since my back miseries and surgery. I went to Ann Arbor and read poetry at the magnificent bookstore, Literati, with poet-friends Teresa Scollon, Alison Swan, and Ellen Stone. Travel made me nervous, but Teresa drove and we stopped regularly so I could stretch and walk. I notice that I’m a little shaky, a little unbalanced. I feel I need to remain more aware of my movements. I guess rearranging your spine can do that.
This is National Poetry Month. My local poetry workshop group will be reading here at Cordia. We’ve devised a plan that works really well for a mixed audience, people who normally wouldn’t attend a reading. We don’t plan the order. One person reads a poem, and someone gets up and responds to that one with a poem of her own. The spontaneity keeps things interesting.
Back to Ann Arbor: Alison leads an Eco Book Club at Literati. Our reading was billed as Eco-poems. I have been trying to fathom in what way the poems we read were Eco-poems.
Here is what I read about that: Eco-poetry is different from nature poetry in at least four ways: Eco-poetry is biocentric (all organisms have objective purposes), it is anti-anthropocentric (not just humans have moral rights), it is environmentally ethical (recognizes and builds on ethical principles about the environment).
I get that. Now that we know what we know about the interdependence of all things, now that we know the earth itself is struggling and the planet will eventually die, we write differently. That pressure, that concern seeps into everything we write. But what I’m thinking is that everything about living in the contemporary world, knowing what we now know, forms our poetry. In a sense, it’s all Eco-Poetry. We can’t write like Wordsworth anymore. We probably even read Wordsworth differently.
My father, for example, saw the world pretty much as a collection of unrelated objects. One object might be helpful to another, but still. He lived in a mechanical world. A mechanism has tangible parts that all work together to make things run. He lived to be almost 101, and he tried valiantly to understand the digital world. He read Einstein over and over and over, trying to come to terms with general relativity, which he felt was a mistake. He couldn’t imagine the depth of the interconnectedness of all things. He couldn’t imagine that there could be, as Einstein put it, “spooky action at a distance.”
So my father’s poetry (which he loved) was made of parts logically connected, most told a story. He could recite so many: “The Highwayman,” “Jabberwocky,” “Invictus,” “The Raven,” etc. He was unable to understand poems that moved into the mind’s interior, whose connections had to be implied. Poems of the digital age are made of a sensibility he couldn’t imagine.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that Robert Frost is out of date. It means that there are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Beyond what we know is more, and still more, and contemporary poems have the feel of getting that, even if they never allude to it.
So. Eco Poetry, it seems to me, is poetry that senses the interconnectedness, even if it’s not about trees and global warming. There is a danger, though, that in our worry over the earth, our poems become polemic, little sermons. Poems need to see clearly. That’s enough.
A little story: Teresa volunteers to work with horses. She’s learned a massage technique that relaxes them. She runs her hand gently down their spine, and when the horse reacts, she’s found a spot of tension, a knot, maybe. She stops there, her hand very gently resting over that spot. The horse will release the tension all at once, with a big yawn. The amazing thing is the other horses in the field will, at the same time, give a big yawn. They’re responding to each other many feet away. Spooky action at a distance.
Works for all of us. We’re not at all as separate as we think we are.
The P.S.
I hope you can join me for this reading—a group of splendid poets. 7:00 EST.