PLAYS - more information about each play will be added in the future
The Physician (1973) -- a blank-verse play set in apartheid South Africa
The Dancing Asparas - or Captain Willard's Blues (1995) -- a prequel/sequel to the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now
Knowing Their Names (1997) -- a one-act farce in tribute to actor/director/playwright Steven Berkoff (the complete text of the play can be found at Iain Fisher's website celebrating Berkoff; his site also includes some short remarks about my first impressions of Berkoff, along with an essay analyzing Berkoff's production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, entitled: Like a Warrior: Laughter, Gender, and Death in Steven Berkoff's Coriolanus)
The Living and the Dead: Six Characters in Search of a Lost War (1999) -- a play about Robert McNamara's role in the Vietnam War
Ambiguity on Broadway (2001) -- a farce about playwrights and literary agents
_________________________________________________
SELECTED ESSAYS (unpublished unless noted)
My Approach to Poetry
The Bard of Avon Dethroned?
Desperate Quest - A Poet Looks at Sustainability
My Approach to Poetry
Ars Poetica
1.
Poems live in the mouth,
not on the page.
This is non-negotiable.
2.
There are approximately
1,000-times more
bad poems than good ones.
3.
Poetry can’t make much
happen— but it can
make some things happen.
* * *
From early on, I wanted to write unified books of poetry, collections devoted to a central subject or theme, exploring things deeply and systematically— as opposed to collections of random poems gathered into a pile every few years. I believe poetry can also be an instrument of profound thought, a light you can shine on virtually any subject, illuminating it in ways that prose, no matter how eloquent and informed, simply cannot do. That is, poetry can be analytical.
This isn’t something I can prove; but it can’t be readily disproved either, and has guided my writing for close to half a century. It also marks me something of an out lier to most poets of my era. I don’t mind that— every poet should be as different as possible from every other poet of his time (and of earlier times), not simply for the sake of variety but because every distinct poetics is potentially a distinct vision, a clarification of reality.
* * *
I was always drawn to narrative and dramatic poetry— first in folk ballads like Sir Patrick Spens, The Highwayman, and Casey at the Bat; and later to the Iliad and Odyssey, Chaucer, Elizabethan poetic drama, the works of Milton, and the Romantic and Victorian poets, especially Browning’s incomparable The Ring and the Book. I also came to love Robinson Jeffers’ searing tales of frontier California, and Robert Frost’s stark vignettes of rural New England— this was poetry with characters, story, and structure. You can’t sustain the poetic fire of a sonnet or one of Emily Dickinson’s gems across an entire narrative, of course, but you can try—and with a little luck and a lot of hard work, the results can be something special.
At first I tried to write like Robert Frost, a fool’s errand for sure; but the effort taught me how supremely hard it is to write well in meter and rhyme. They can’t be just adornments; they must grow organically out of the poet’s mind and sensibility. A perfect rhyme or a skillful metrical effect can never be forced into being— as Keats put it, poetry “must come as the leaves to a tree, or it had better not come at all.” This is true of free verse too, of course, but in strictured poetry it is doubly true. Paste on a rhyme and dog trot your meter and you get… well, doggerel.
So where does that leave the free-verse poet? Maybe too free, frankly. If doggerel was the danger inherited from the Romantic/Victorian tradition, the constant risk for us now is the possible collapse into mere chopped-up prose— and for me the best defense against that was voiced by T.S. Eliot in his axiom that every line of free verse must have “the shadow of an iamb” behind it; that is, it must have an audible rhythmic pattern that keeps the language brisk, alive, vivid, memorable. As Pound put it: “Make it fresh.” Conforming to this standard makes free verse every bit as difficult as poetry in rhyme and meter, if not more so, since “freshness” is a very subjective thing compared to words that echo each other and the rhythm of regular beats across a line.
Most of my poems are in free verse, and I pay very close attention to sound, rhythm, stress, line length and line breaks, enjambment, stanza form, and even line spacing. These elements can add some of the intensification that rhyme and meter once did, but not as strongly— and I suspect it’s possible that in hundred years or so, the free verse experiment may have played itself out and poets will once again compose, if not in sonnets and other fixed forms, at least in rhymed and metered couplets, quatrains, etc. (as pop music has always done, at least until the late 90s). Such lyrical properties, after all, endured for millennia before the free verse revolution, which is barely two hundred years old now— a very short time in the history of language and the human impulse to bring it into song.
_________________________________
The Bard of Avon Dethroned?
In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare boasts:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
The Bard was at least partially right— he has continued to be read all over the world with a reverential fervor that at times borders on hysteria. Critic Harold Bloom, for instance, giddily credits him with “inventing” the modern concept of “the human.” And yet his reputation has long been shadowed by two controversies: a) was he anti-Semitic (The Merchant of Venice) and b) was he sexist (The Taming of the Shrew). Although I suspect he was both, I think there is room for disagreement here.
In spite of these concerns, however, Shakespeare’s psychological and dramatic powers are certainly undeniable and have led many critics and others to conclude that he was the most talented poet who ever lived. Maybe so, in terms of sheer verbal power— although that is a questionable criterion— but his world view and politics have recently come to seem repellent to me, primarily as a result of several scholarly studies arguing persuasively that he was a cheerleader for what historians have increasingly come to recognize as a brutal police state: the so-called “Golden Age” of England during the rule of Queen Elizabeth and King James.
Of course, the debunking of Shakespeare I offer here will seem like heresy and arrogance to many lovers of poetry. All I can say is that I’m far from the only one who holds such views. Here are a few of the revisionist studies of Shakespeare that have greatly (and permanently) altered my view of him:
If you can look closely at such studies and say they simply don’t matter for our Great Will Shakespeare, his genius as a poet/dramatist puts him above such concerns, then you and I simply are not on the same page in our valuation of poetry— or life.
_________________________________
Desperate Quest: A Poet Looks at Sustainability (excerpts)
Published in: J. Williams & W. Forbes (Eds), Toward a More Livable World; Social dimensions of sustainability - Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2012; pp. 83-112. The essay contains four sections: Preface: Part I, Thinking like an engineer; Part II, Thinking like a poet; Epilogue.
PREFACE – Please! Somebody Talk Me Down!
Desperation is probably not the most congenial term to introduce into a conversation on sustainability. So, with apologies to the other contributors to this volume who may have a more optimistic outlook— not to mention better credentials on the subject than mine— I must first issue a caveat: I seriously doubt that sustainability can be achieved in the “developed” countries of the world, much less in the Third World; that is, not with the speed, precision, political will, and coordination necessary to prevent massive ecological and climate disruption, and consequently a virtual collapse of the corporate “civilization” that has come to dominate the globe over the past several centuries. [1]
In fact, just thinking about “sustainability” for very long makes my head feel like it’s about to explode. This is not an effort to be funny— it’s a simple fact. I said as much to Dr. Jerry Williams when he invited me to contribute to this volume. Actually, the way I put it to him was more like: “The word sustainability triggers a rush of factoids in my brain that jostle each other madly for a while before dissolving into incomprehensibility.” I thought that would stop Jerry in his tracks. For reasons of his own, however, he wouldn’t take no for an answer— so he bears at least part of the responsibility for the dark, rambling nature of these remarks.
Why elaborate on such a dour vision? First, I wanted to see if I could talk myself out of my funk. As Rachel Maddow says: “Please, somebody, talk me down!” To which, my muse whispered in my ear: Fat chance— but worth a try. I suppose that’s a confession that I still harbor a few grains of hope that humanity will come to its senses at one second before midnight and pull off the greatest comeback since the day the Buffalo Bills, trailing 38-3 late in the game, beat the Houston Oilers, 41-38. It was almost a miracle. Ah yes, miracles! That is precisely what is needed in these desperate times— and, of course, precisely what we’re not about to get.
__________________________________
[1] For more hopeful views, see: Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow & Company, 1997); Eric A. Davison, You Can’t Eat GNP: Economics as if Ecology Mattered (Perseus Publishing, 2000); Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest - How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (Viking Press, 2007) and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Little Brown and Co. 1999); David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth – A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2nd edition, 2010,); Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (St. Martins’s Griffon, 2007); Harvey Franklin Wasserman, SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 (publisher unknown); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: the Roots of Ecology (Sierra Club Books, 1977).
_______________________________________
from PART I. THINKING LIKE AN ENGINEER
The Offering
There is a mythic bird—poised
on the edge of the day
after tomorrow. He may be
the one Wallace Stevens saw,
a creature with fire-feathers
dangling down— or he may be
an heir of the huge vultures
on the walls of Çatal Höyük.
I approach the bird slowly
offering the food called
sustainability— fresh, raw,
undigested. The large bird
treads the ground, hard,
eying me warily— but
without fear or forgiveness.
He sniffs at the offering
then turns away. He peers up
at the gathering clouds, as if
he sees something
up there--
something I cannot see.
Note - Çatal Höyük was a Neolithic village in Anatolia (Turkey), ca. 7,500 BC. Stevens’ bird is in the poem “Of Mere Being.”
____________________________
EPILOGUE -- Coincidences, Confessions, Qualifications
Coincidences
Ironically, in the same week that I was invited to contribute to this volume, I discovered the book Can Poetry Save the Earth? – A Field Guide to Nature Poems (Yale University Press, 2009) by John Felstiner. Great, I thought— this guy has done half my work for me! The title’s half-serious, half-wistful rhetorical question locates the solace of poetry in the context of our unfolding planetary crisis—and the book did help me find some prime examples of eco-poetry, particularly in Dickinson and Snyder.[1]
Felstiner’s survey of more than fifty poets is fresh and nuanced, celebrating in a meticulous prose both their craft and their insights on our current ecological crisis. He ends the book with this query: “Can Poetry Save the Earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.” That strikes an appropriate note of humility in addressing such a vast subject— poetry’s influence is finite, its blessings a necessary but not sufficient element in any reconstitution of a sane and sustainable world.
Confessions
I began my writing life trying to take up W. H. Auden’s challenge to poets, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats:
Follow poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
Today, the bottom of the night seems darker than I ever imagined— and it has become much harder for me to persuade myself to rejoice, much less to persuade anyone else. So, no, I haven’t talked myself down. To the contrary, I still fear, as a friend put it recently, that we are probably “an evolutionary dead-end species.”
And yet, I also fervently believe with Keats that the poetry of earth is never dead, with Stafford that the earth “speaks everything to us,” and with C.D. Wright that there is a sanctuary in the mind made of poetry and music and laughter. There are consolations, very real ones, in what Robinson Jeffers called “the honey of peace in old poems. “
I further believe that the ethos of sustainability found at the heart of the greatest poems of the English language can contribute to a wide range of redemptive environmental efforts. As Paul Hawken points out, there are literally millions of such projects underway now, large and small, around the globe, and I could just as well have begun this essay with a catalogue of them. I say hail and godspeed to everyone involved in such endeavors— with the hope that the labors of the community of poets will increasingly reinforce their efforts.
Qualifications
I feel obligated to say that I find nothing in poetry, not in mine, nor that of any other poet, living or dead, in any language— nothing that seems to embody a truly “digested,” sustainable, ecological consciousness that even remotely approximates the sensibility of preindustrial indigenous populations and some of their present-day heirs— from the Hopi and Tohono O’odham of the desert Southwest, to the Australian aboriginals, the Pumé of Venezuela, the pygmy people of Africa, and the Yanomami of South America.[2]
Of course, we must guard against idealizing or trivializing the complex ethnographies of these cultures, and so I acknowledge that some of the ancient, tribal cultures around the world have participated in the on-going “Holocene Extinction” as well as intra tribal violence. But we can still look to the tribal peoples who have historically demonstrated a graceful, instinctive grasp of Gaia’s intentions, habits, and (above all) needs that have been lost to modernity. Taking that look in a serious way is one of the last, best hopes for us as a species of learning again how to say:
In our minds, so be it.
________________________________
[1] The book is enhanced by a unique selection of color photographs, from Blake’s Creation, which depicts the madly abstract Urizen (Blake’s version of Jehovah) attempting to geometrically measure the cosmos, to a child’s two-part, colored-chalk picture heart-breakingly called Yucky Pollution, Shiny Pretty.
[2] See Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi (Viking Press, 1963); Gary Paul Nabhan, A Naturalist in Papago Indian [Tohono O’odham] Territory (North Point Press,1982); Harvey Arden, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia (HarperCollins Perennial, 1994); Pei lin Yu, Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman Anthropologist in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Jean-Pierre Hallet, Congo Kitabu ( Random House, 1964); Louis Sarno, Songs from the Forest – My Life Among the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies (Penguin Books, 1993) and the CD Echoes of the Forest – Music of the Central African Pygmies (Ellipsis Arts, 1995); Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (Simon & Schuster, 1961); Dennison Berwick, Savages: The Life and Killing of the Yanomami [Kindle Edition] (Voyage Press, 2009); Kenneth Good and David Chanoff, Into The Heart: One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997).
The Physician (1973) -- a blank-verse play set in apartheid South Africa
The Dancing Asparas - or Captain Willard's Blues (1995) -- a prequel/sequel to the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now
Knowing Their Names (1997) -- a one-act farce in tribute to actor/director/playwright Steven Berkoff (the complete text of the play can be found at Iain Fisher's website celebrating Berkoff; his site also includes some short remarks about my first impressions of Berkoff, along with an essay analyzing Berkoff's production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, entitled: Like a Warrior: Laughter, Gender, and Death in Steven Berkoff's Coriolanus)
The Living and the Dead: Six Characters in Search of a Lost War (1999) -- a play about Robert McNamara's role in the Vietnam War
Ambiguity on Broadway (2001) -- a farce about playwrights and literary agents
_________________________________________________
SELECTED ESSAYS (unpublished unless noted)
My Approach to Poetry
The Bard of Avon Dethroned?
Desperate Quest - A Poet Looks at Sustainability
My Approach to Poetry
Ars Poetica
1.
Poems live in the mouth,
not on the page.
This is non-negotiable.
2.
There are approximately
1,000-times more
bad poems than good ones.
3.
Poetry can’t make much
happen— but it can
make some things happen.
* * *
From early on, I wanted to write unified books of poetry, collections devoted to a central subject or theme, exploring things deeply and systematically— as opposed to collections of random poems gathered into a pile every few years. I believe poetry can also be an instrument of profound thought, a light you can shine on virtually any subject, illuminating it in ways that prose, no matter how eloquent and informed, simply cannot do. That is, poetry can be analytical.
This isn’t something I can prove; but it can’t be readily disproved either, and has guided my writing for close to half a century. It also marks me something of an out lier to most poets of my era. I don’t mind that— every poet should be as different as possible from every other poet of his time (and of earlier times), not simply for the sake of variety but because every distinct poetics is potentially a distinct vision, a clarification of reality.
* * *
I was always drawn to narrative and dramatic poetry— first in folk ballads like Sir Patrick Spens, The Highwayman, and Casey at the Bat; and later to the Iliad and Odyssey, Chaucer, Elizabethan poetic drama, the works of Milton, and the Romantic and Victorian poets, especially Browning’s incomparable The Ring and the Book. I also came to love Robinson Jeffers’ searing tales of frontier California, and Robert Frost’s stark vignettes of rural New England— this was poetry with characters, story, and structure. You can’t sustain the poetic fire of a sonnet or one of Emily Dickinson’s gems across an entire narrative, of course, but you can try—and with a little luck and a lot of hard work, the results can be something special.
At first I tried to write like Robert Frost, a fool’s errand for sure; but the effort taught me how supremely hard it is to write well in meter and rhyme. They can’t be just adornments; they must grow organically out of the poet’s mind and sensibility. A perfect rhyme or a skillful metrical effect can never be forced into being— as Keats put it, poetry “must come as the leaves to a tree, or it had better not come at all.” This is true of free verse too, of course, but in strictured poetry it is doubly true. Paste on a rhyme and dog trot your meter and you get… well, doggerel.
So where does that leave the free-verse poet? Maybe too free, frankly. If doggerel was the danger inherited from the Romantic/Victorian tradition, the constant risk for us now is the possible collapse into mere chopped-up prose— and for me the best defense against that was voiced by T.S. Eliot in his axiom that every line of free verse must have “the shadow of an iamb” behind it; that is, it must have an audible rhythmic pattern that keeps the language brisk, alive, vivid, memorable. As Pound put it: “Make it fresh.” Conforming to this standard makes free verse every bit as difficult as poetry in rhyme and meter, if not more so, since “freshness” is a very subjective thing compared to words that echo each other and the rhythm of regular beats across a line.
Most of my poems are in free verse, and I pay very close attention to sound, rhythm, stress, line length and line breaks, enjambment, stanza form, and even line spacing. These elements can add some of the intensification that rhyme and meter once did, but not as strongly— and I suspect it’s possible that in hundred years or so, the free verse experiment may have played itself out and poets will once again compose, if not in sonnets and other fixed forms, at least in rhymed and metered couplets, quatrains, etc. (as pop music has always done, at least until the late 90s). Such lyrical properties, after all, endured for millennia before the free verse revolution, which is barely two hundred years old now— a very short time in the history of language and the human impulse to bring it into song.
_________________________________
The Bard of Avon Dethroned?
In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare boasts:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
The Bard was at least partially right— he has continued to be read all over the world with a reverential fervor that at times borders on hysteria. Critic Harold Bloom, for instance, giddily credits him with “inventing” the modern concept of “the human.” And yet his reputation has long been shadowed by two controversies: a) was he anti-Semitic (The Merchant of Venice) and b) was he sexist (The Taming of the Shrew). Although I suspect he was both, I think there is room for disagreement here.
In spite of these concerns, however, Shakespeare’s psychological and dramatic powers are certainly undeniable and have led many critics and others to conclude that he was the most talented poet who ever lived. Maybe so, in terms of sheer verbal power— although that is a questionable criterion— but his world view and politics have recently come to seem repellent to me, primarily as a result of several scholarly studies arguing persuasively that he was a cheerleader for what historians have increasingly come to recognize as a brutal police state: the so-called “Golden Age” of England during the rule of Queen Elizabeth and King James.
Of course, the debunking of Shakespeare I offer here will seem like heresy and arrogance to many lovers of poetry. All I can say is that I’m far from the only one who holds such views. Here are a few of the revisionist studies of Shakespeare that have greatly (and permanently) altered my view of him:
- Curtis C. Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (St. Martins Press, 1996)
- Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576-1642 (Princeton U Press, 1981)
- Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (Yale U Press, 1995)
- Nick Hazelwood, The Queen’s Slave Trader: John Hawkyns, Elizabeth, and Trafficking in Human Souls (William Morrow, 2004)
- Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, editors, Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (U Penn Press, 1999) – See especially
- “Introduction: A New New Historicism, ‘To roast a Goose alive,’ ” p. 2
- John Anderson, “The Aristocracy and Their Mental World” in The Oxford History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford U Press,
- 1996), See especially the characterization of the aristocratic view of the lower classes as the “meaner sort… un-thankful,
- wayward, cruelly envious and impudent... rabble [and] fools,” which might stand as the caption to many of Shakespeare’
- scenes of lower class people. The words are actually those of a chaplain at Capel house, the ancestral estate of one of the
- elite 5% of the population controlling some 70% of the nation’s wealth in Shakespeare’s time. p. 175
If you can look closely at such studies and say they simply don’t matter for our Great Will Shakespeare, his genius as a poet/dramatist puts him above such concerns, then you and I simply are not on the same page in our valuation of poetry— or life.
_________________________________
Desperate Quest: A Poet Looks at Sustainability (excerpts)
Published in: J. Williams & W. Forbes (Eds), Toward a More Livable World; Social dimensions of sustainability - Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2012; pp. 83-112. The essay contains four sections: Preface: Part I, Thinking like an engineer; Part II, Thinking like a poet; Epilogue.
PREFACE – Please! Somebody Talk Me Down!
Desperation is probably not the most congenial term to introduce into a conversation on sustainability. So, with apologies to the other contributors to this volume who may have a more optimistic outlook— not to mention better credentials on the subject than mine— I must first issue a caveat: I seriously doubt that sustainability can be achieved in the “developed” countries of the world, much less in the Third World; that is, not with the speed, precision, political will, and coordination necessary to prevent massive ecological and climate disruption, and consequently a virtual collapse of the corporate “civilization” that has come to dominate the globe over the past several centuries. [1]
In fact, just thinking about “sustainability” for very long makes my head feel like it’s about to explode. This is not an effort to be funny— it’s a simple fact. I said as much to Dr. Jerry Williams when he invited me to contribute to this volume. Actually, the way I put it to him was more like: “The word sustainability triggers a rush of factoids in my brain that jostle each other madly for a while before dissolving into incomprehensibility.” I thought that would stop Jerry in his tracks. For reasons of his own, however, he wouldn’t take no for an answer— so he bears at least part of the responsibility for the dark, rambling nature of these remarks.
Why elaborate on such a dour vision? First, I wanted to see if I could talk myself out of my funk. As Rachel Maddow says: “Please, somebody, talk me down!” To which, my muse whispered in my ear: Fat chance— but worth a try. I suppose that’s a confession that I still harbor a few grains of hope that humanity will come to its senses at one second before midnight and pull off the greatest comeback since the day the Buffalo Bills, trailing 38-3 late in the game, beat the Houston Oilers, 41-38. It was almost a miracle. Ah yes, miracles! That is precisely what is needed in these desperate times— and, of course, precisely what we’re not about to get.
__________________________________
[1] For more hopeful views, see: Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (William Morrow & Company, 1997); Eric A. Davison, You Can’t Eat GNP: Economics as if Ecology Mattered (Perseus Publishing, 2000); Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest - How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (Viking Press, 2007) and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Little Brown and Co. 1999); David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth – A Declaration of Independence from Wall Street (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2nd edition, 2010,); Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (St. Martins’s Griffon, 2007); Harvey Franklin Wasserman, SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 (publisher unknown); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: the Roots of Ecology (Sierra Club Books, 1977).
_______________________________________
from PART I. THINKING LIKE AN ENGINEER
The Offering
There is a mythic bird—poised
on the edge of the day
after tomorrow. He may be
the one Wallace Stevens saw,
a creature with fire-feathers
dangling down— or he may be
an heir of the huge vultures
on the walls of Çatal Höyük.
I approach the bird slowly
offering the food called
sustainability— fresh, raw,
undigested. The large bird
treads the ground, hard,
eying me warily— but
without fear or forgiveness.
He sniffs at the offering
then turns away. He peers up
at the gathering clouds, as if
he sees something
up there--
something I cannot see.
Note - Çatal Höyük was a Neolithic village in Anatolia (Turkey), ca. 7,500 BC. Stevens’ bird is in the poem “Of Mere Being.”
____________________________
EPILOGUE -- Coincidences, Confessions, Qualifications
Coincidences
Ironically, in the same week that I was invited to contribute to this volume, I discovered the book Can Poetry Save the Earth? – A Field Guide to Nature Poems (Yale University Press, 2009) by John Felstiner. Great, I thought— this guy has done half my work for me! The title’s half-serious, half-wistful rhetorical question locates the solace of poetry in the context of our unfolding planetary crisis—and the book did help me find some prime examples of eco-poetry, particularly in Dickinson and Snyder.[1]
Felstiner’s survey of more than fifty poets is fresh and nuanced, celebrating in a meticulous prose both their craft and their insights on our current ecological crisis. He ends the book with this query: “Can Poetry Save the Earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.” That strikes an appropriate note of humility in addressing such a vast subject— poetry’s influence is finite, its blessings a necessary but not sufficient element in any reconstitution of a sane and sustainable world.
Confessions
I began my writing life trying to take up W. H. Auden’s challenge to poets, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats:
Follow poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
Today, the bottom of the night seems darker than I ever imagined— and it has become much harder for me to persuade myself to rejoice, much less to persuade anyone else. So, no, I haven’t talked myself down. To the contrary, I still fear, as a friend put it recently, that we are probably “an evolutionary dead-end species.”
And yet, I also fervently believe with Keats that the poetry of earth is never dead, with Stafford that the earth “speaks everything to us,” and with C.D. Wright that there is a sanctuary in the mind made of poetry and music and laughter. There are consolations, very real ones, in what Robinson Jeffers called “the honey of peace in old poems. “
I further believe that the ethos of sustainability found at the heart of the greatest poems of the English language can contribute to a wide range of redemptive environmental efforts. As Paul Hawken points out, there are literally millions of such projects underway now, large and small, around the globe, and I could just as well have begun this essay with a catalogue of them. I say hail and godspeed to everyone involved in such endeavors— with the hope that the labors of the community of poets will increasingly reinforce their efforts.
Qualifications
I feel obligated to say that I find nothing in poetry, not in mine, nor that of any other poet, living or dead, in any language— nothing that seems to embody a truly “digested,” sustainable, ecological consciousness that even remotely approximates the sensibility of preindustrial indigenous populations and some of their present-day heirs— from the Hopi and Tohono O’odham of the desert Southwest, to the Australian aboriginals, the Pumé of Venezuela, the pygmy people of Africa, and the Yanomami of South America.[2]
Of course, we must guard against idealizing or trivializing the complex ethnographies of these cultures, and so I acknowledge that some of the ancient, tribal cultures around the world have participated in the on-going “Holocene Extinction” as well as intra tribal violence. But we can still look to the tribal peoples who have historically demonstrated a graceful, instinctive grasp of Gaia’s intentions, habits, and (above all) needs that have been lost to modernity. Taking that look in a serious way is one of the last, best hopes for us as a species of learning again how to say:
In our minds, so be it.
________________________________
[1] The book is enhanced by a unique selection of color photographs, from Blake’s Creation, which depicts the madly abstract Urizen (Blake’s version of Jehovah) attempting to geometrically measure the cosmos, to a child’s two-part, colored-chalk picture heart-breakingly called Yucky Pollution, Shiny Pretty.
[2] See Frank Waters, The Book of the Hopi (Viking Press, 1963); Gary Paul Nabhan, A Naturalist in Papago Indian [Tohono O’odham] Territory (North Point Press,1982); Harvey Arden, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia (HarperCollins Perennial, 1994); Pei lin Yu, Hungry Lightning: Notes of a Woman Anthropologist in Venezuela (University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Jean-Pierre Hallet, Congo Kitabu ( Random House, 1964); Louis Sarno, Songs from the Forest – My Life Among the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies (Penguin Books, 1993) and the CD Echoes of the Forest – Music of the Central African Pygmies (Ellipsis Arts, 1995); Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (Simon & Schuster, 1961); Dennison Berwick, Savages: The Life and Killing of the Yanomami [Kindle Edition] (Voyage Press, 2009); Kenneth Good and David Chanoff, Into The Heart: One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997).
Copyright Ken Lauter 2017