CATCH & RELEASE: Letting Nature Go in Contemporary Poetics
Christopher Kondrich
we speak of the world
in words that are not the world
and then the world is “ours”
Dan Beachy-Quick
“Nature poetry has often become (though shamelessly generalized),” as Jack Collom
writes in his contribution to the eco language reader, “a sort of specialty (as if nature were a
hobby, or an acquired taste).” So, too, nature functions as a hobby for the contemporary
connoisseur and family-friendly audience alike. We go on safari, visit zoos, drive through
habitats owned and operated by theme parks to marvel at the breath of a giraffe fogging up
our truck window. “It is not the moment of the park that returns to us in the present, but
instead its quality as a fetish, as a commodity,” writes Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands. We still
have not quite escaped the notion popular in the early 1800s that to escape into nature
meant tapping into the spirit housed in the souls of all men. Instead of a vast, undiscovered
frontier, we have ecotourism. Instead of walks by Walden Pond, we zip-line through the
jungles of Central America. Both activities encourage the entitlement we feel towards nature.
Entitled to quarantine it and then visit when we feel burdened by industry. And so, here we
are – frequenters of zoos and safaris and jungle adventures, the concrete reifiers of our
ideological barrier, the barrier between human and natural spheres that has poisoned
traditional nature poetry by positioning nature as an object of endless anthropomorphism.
That the human and natural spheres are separate means that they are not horizontal, they are
vertically oriented, and, thus, nature is the subject of a pitying hierarchy, poised and ready for
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that perfect metaphor. We must find a way for nature to exist simultaneously in the world
and in poetry with the same value, which is to say that the notion of value should be
completely disregarded. We must not alter the aesthetic trajectory of nature in pursuit of a
poetics codified by our default mode of anthropomorphization, which is to say traditional
nature poetry has got to go.
When I say traditional nature poetry, I mean the kind of poetry that “takes after
water, flowing yet seeming motionless,” as John Felstiner writes in his comprehensive, yet
inanely titled history Can Poetry Save the Earth? Although the kind of poetry that “takes after
water” has some aesthetic value, it proves to be an ineffectual comparison given our
propensity for making that kind of comparison in the first place, not to mention our
propensity to anthropomorphize nature. “Anthropomorphism is inescapable the moment
one believes one is communicating with the other (human or animal),” Tyrone Williams
writes in the eco language reader, and communicating with the other, communing with nature,
tapping into the spark and spirit of nature is a hallmark of the disposition or poetic impulse
that seeks to valorize as opposed to infantilize nature. This poetic impulse has been around
as long as language with each incarnation a product of its generation’s relationship to
science, religion and selfhood. But as we will see with Bishop, Oppen and Hass, the tricky
part of updating this impulse is attuning poetry with the nuances of language’s
anthropomorphic violence. Communing with nature in poetry must allow nature to retain its
sense of otherness without alienating it or pitting it again the poet hierarchically as so many
writers do when employing nature as a receptacle of human qualities.
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Elizabeth Bishop, looking into the eyes of “The Fish,” does not see herself or her
society. She does not see anything but “the irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil
/ seen through the lenses / of old scratched isinglass.” Although she applies a manmade
creation in the isinglass, it is a moment of one eye entering another. Felstiner notes that she
greets the fish as a poet or painter would greet the spirit of all things, with reverence, with
awe that this fish is other. Bishop does not subdue otherness, but, in a flash
… oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
The light and spirit of the natural world fill her eyes with wonder, overwhelming the senses
in a scene that combines both the indescribability of the moment and a heightened realism
and exactness. It is the bailer exactly that is rusted orange; it is the oarlocks and gunnels and
no other things, but then rainbow floods her mind, our mind and the world can no longer be
held in the tweezers of our sight. What does Bishop do? She lets the fish go. She lets the fish go.
After that moment of unmatched connection, Bishop understands that she will never fully
understand, and, realizing this, releases the fish, releases the other from her human grasp.
Sublime, from the OED, relates to “things in nature and art [that] affect the mind with a
sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power.” An essential quality of the sublime is
its potential to overwhelm, to make us feel small, to consume our emotions, and I believe
Bishop feels this notion of sublimity in the marrow of her bones. She recognizes that part of
what makes the sublime so sublime is its otherness. She keeps the fish in its state of
otherness by not projecting, by not trying to subdue its qualities. Marcella Durand writes,
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“[the] idea of equality of value [between all living things] is essential for moving away from
the exploitation and inertness of traditional nature poetry.” This notion of equality includes
the removal of humans from our dominant role, leveling the playing field, as it were, by
letting the other stay sublime, by letting the fish go. Bishop achieves this with the content and
execution of her poem, but as 21st Century creatures forced to use a language systematically
linked to a society and culture that prizes the separation of humans and nature, how do we
break these barriers using the very language that separates us? We must look to George
Oppen.
In “Psalm,” Oppen achieves this barrier-breaking in a moment of connection with
nature that is similar to Bishop’s connection, but with a twist. Speaking of deer he
encounters,
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distance
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.
Oppen could have said anything in place of “noun,” but he chooses the route with the least
amount of language’s violence. “Noun” calls attention to the possibilities of the moment, it
highlights the moment’s haecceity, its thisness, the nounness of the noun itself. We know they
are deer because of its context, but there is something about “noun” that lets other be other
objectively, as objectively as possible; he lets it be other by simply acknowledging its
sublimity. Oppen allows the otherness of the deer and the accompanying moment its
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sublimity by allowing it to retain its mystery, by allowing the “noun” to retain its multiplicity.
His moment with the deer differs from the moment in Robert Hass’ “Saint Lucia,” in which
Hass laments,
What I want happens
Not when the deer freezes in the shade
And looks at you and you hold very still
And meet her gaze but in the moment after
When she flicks her ears & starts to feed again.
Oppen’s moment differs in its lack of desire. Oppen does not want anything; what he sees is.
What Hass wants is an illusion; he wants the deer to pretend that he has not just disturbed it,
to pretend that by describing the deer in its element he has not just implicated himself into
the moment, and, thus, disturbed it. Hass’ moment is shaded with arrogance, and, while I
assume this was not his intent, it comes across as an empty gesture. Arrogance is the defiler
of mystery; it is the pin to mystery’s balloon. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that I do
not advocate the flagrant use of “noun,” but the awareness of language’s implications in
relation to the notion of equality of all living things. By describing his moment with the deer,
albeit beautifully, Hass subdues it. By allowing the deer to remain other, Oppen keeps his
mitts off.
Wallace Stevens and Archibald MacLeish have famously called for a poem’s being, as
opposed to seeming or meaning. They have directed our attention toward the notion that a
poem can and will be if we loose the constraints of seeming and meaning. This is what I believe
Bishop and Oppen do, if not in so many words. For all the valuable philosophical bluster of
the eco language reader, for all the historical contextualization of Can Poetry Save the Earth?, this is
where we are. Look around. Look away and take a deep breath. Everything around you is
being. The trees are swaying; the clouds are wafting; the grass is doing its grass thing. So, too,
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we must let nature continue being in poetry. “I’ve become more and more convinced that
[ecopoetics] isn’t something that can be aimed at,” Evelyn Reilly writes, “but that instead
happens as poets participate in realizing the full implications of our position as languageusing animals in a world composed of interconnection.” Reilly is spot on. We must
understand that this realization may be best fulfilled without imposing ourselves in the
natural world. One way writers can do so is to find new and inspiring ways of failing to
capture its beauty and sublimity. We say that there is a language of the spheres, of the rain
and the wind, but perhaps the best way to speak about such a language is to listen, to let the
fish go.
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