No Nature Poems, Please

I went looking for the wild one, the howler, the vatic tramp.
The one for whom the wounded hills are body burns, whose
blood is stained with the old love-wine of poet and Earth –
warrior poet, slinging battle flak out at the static
shattering polite conversations everywhere.

I looked in the anthologies, listening for echoes,
traced for signs in the quarterlies, magazines, best ofs.
I learned it’s been a good year for poetry. Grants and awards
keep coming in. Contests and prizes are proliferating,
the wise grey consensus counsels a return to the classics.

Meanwhile, poor scientist holds extinction
in a palm full of numbers
with nothing but data
to howl with.

This untitled poem by Rob Lewis appeared on the very first page of Dark Mountain: Issue 1, published in 2010. For me, it encapsulated what this strange new project was about: breaking away from the ‘wise grey consensus’ that guarded contemporary culture and seeking out the wild ones, the howlers, who were – unfashionably – attempting to engage with a world in a deep ecological crisis. It made a fierce impression on me, and I’ve read it again many times.

Nine issues later, in 2016, we published Uncivilised Poetics, an anthology not only of poetry but writing about poetry, and specifically the kind of poetry that makes sense in these times. As it said in the editorial, the issue was ‘a holding vessel for multiple voices, well-known and new, human and nonhuman, trying at a time of global suffering and loss, to honestly express what is.’ So it only felt right that Rob, whose poem had started our first book, contributed an essay titled ‘No Nature Poems, Please’.

In many ways, the essay expands on that short, explosive poem, delving into the question of what poetry is really for. The genre of Nature Writing has boomed in recent years, and bookshops are full of beautiful volumes about our damaged relationship with the natural world, many of them claiming to help us regain what we’ve lost and lead us back to wholeness, or beauty, or humility – all for nothing more than the book’s RRP. But however much this might reflect a genuine yearning in our culture, it’s hard to escape the sense that it’s just another consumer trend. Ecological collapse used to be an unpopular subject. Now, with appropriate marketing, climate grief sells.

Rob’s essay teases apart the meaning of ‘nature poetry’, when the very term suggests that nature is somehow separate. Through a journey on a Greyhound bus, by way of Gerard De Nerval, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Bly, it explores the question of our entanglement with the living world, and the uses to which humans put their words. It’s also written beautifully, because… well, Rob is a poet. And eight years after it was written, it hasn’t lost its howl. (NH)

If it was just the one publication, I might not have noticed. But as I leafed through the pages I saw it again and again, always at the end of the blurb, always italicised for emphasis – no nature poems, please. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Was this merely a device to turn away a kind of stereotype, the rhyming ode to butterflies and sunshine? Would a pared down, mytho-poetic take on bear scat, à la Gary Snyder, be acceptable? Was the nature poem merely falling out of fashion, or was something more profound going on?

What stuck with me most, though, was the very notion of a ‘nature poem’. What is such a thing? How, in this age, do you define it? How were these editors defining it?

We have a general idea about the nature poem. It is something with a long tradition. It is about a ‘nature’ that is out there, around us, but not necessarily inside us or interacting with us. It often bears the feeling of adulation, with the poet cast as a small thing before a large and powerful apparition.

But in the present age, with a sixth great extinction underway and the climate wrecking-ball swinging through time toward pretty much everything alive, does the nature poem as we commonly think of it still exist? And by extension, does the received tradition still sing true? Maybe those editors heard a dissonance, an unnaturalness, that’s worth taking note of.

Of course, to define the nature poem you first must define ‘nature’. For me that’s pretty simple. Nature is all. It is space and time and all the relationships and particulars between, which includes stars and sand grains, songbirds and air, photosynthesis and respiration, frogs and gravity and cedars and, of course, us. After all, we share 70% of our DNA with sea sponges. The reason we test our poisons on rats and mice is because we share the same ancient evolutionary pathway. And of course we all wear the vestiges of tails in our tail bones. 

This notion, of the human physically emerging from nature, is nothing new. Science accepts and explains it as evolution. We can take it one step further, though, to say that our inner qualities, like those of spirit and creativity, also derive from nature. We sing love songs because love and singing are inherent in nature. We write poems and paint canvasses because self-expression is inherent in nature. What is a flower doing but expressing itself?

With this rounder, more inclusive view of nature, the notion of a separate category of poem called the nature poem becomes a little problematic. If there is to be a special category, perhaps it should be the non-nature poem. We could call it the anthro-poem. But again, where would you find such a thing? That is, how and where do you end nature?

A few weeks after my encounter with Poet’s Market, I was on a Greyhound bus on my way to Denver. It was night. Our darkened tunnel with its hooded aisle lights raced through an even darker tunnel of highway. I looked around at the tilting, bobbing heads and thought, ‘I could write it now’ – the non-nature poem, that is. There we were, humans only, encapsulated in a machine, the world out our windows hidden by night, indecipherable. No nature in there, right? But someone must have had an apple in their bag, which was filling the cabin with the sweet tang of an apple orchard. And there was the watery chorus of our own breathing, and with it the watery reminder of our breathing intimacy with plants. Our craft was built with steel hacked from mountains, fuelled by the compressed and composted residue of ancient life layered on ancient life. Our wheels were round, the signature shape of nature.

And we were rolling on a planet rolling toward the sun. Out my window a thin line of red appeared on the horizon, as if the horizon had been slit and risen with blood. Milky pools of mist hung in the folds of pasture. The bus banked a long curve and through the shoulders of two hills a shaft of light found a chestnut mare standing alone in a field, igniting in the haze around her a rainbow halo of refracted luminescence.

Involuntarily, I gasped, and then looked down the rows to see if anyone heard, but everyone was asleep. I wanted to nudge the person ahead of me and tap the glass, saying ‘Hurry, look.’ Instead I gathered pen and journal and followed an instinct familiar to poets, to record the sublime indication, the brief revelation, to not let such magic be lost to a world literally racing by. And then I laughed to myself; writing a nature poem again.

When the bus arrived in Denver I had a couple hours to kill waiting for my ride, so I wandered over to Tattered Cover Books, Denver’s largest bookstore, and found the poetry section in the magazine racks. I was curious to see how no nature poems, please was playing out there.

As for nature, human and non-human, things were not looking so good. The forces of economic globalism were being loosed on the earth. Capital roamed the globe with digital ease and at fibre optic speed. Small farming communities were collapsing around the world. The mining of the oceans and gang rape of primeval forests proceeded apace with corporate efficiency. And Bill McKibben’s once lonely cry about climate change, first uttered in 1988 with the publication of The End of Nature, was being echoed by a loudening chorus of very alarmed scientists of every imaginable discipline.

Botanists saw plants blossoming strangely early, lepidopterists saw butterfly larvae starving as a result, oceanographers saw the chemistry of the oceans turning acidic, hydrologists saw glaciers withdrawing, herpetologists saw frogs disappearing almost overnight. So I was naturally curious about what poetry was seeing. What did poetry have to say about this broad-scale calamity befalling the earth? I picked up one journal then another, scanning the contents, looking for clues. Gradually, I realised, at least according to my little sample, the answer was nothing, nothing at all.

These were publications popular enough to earn a place in the racks of Denver’s largest bookstore, and included such stalwarts as the Paris Review and Poetry. Like Poet’s Market, they arrived via the marketing of poetry, the business end of the stick, and as such I felt they represented poetry in an ‘official’ sort of way. If we can speak of a poetry establishment, the publications before me were its product.

Hearing echoes of no nature poems, please, I put the last quarterly back on the rack and stood there feeling strangely dislocated, and perhaps a little ashamed. ‘Who am I, some sort of poetry cop? 

Why not let people write whatever they want?’ This was not a role I relished, yet I felt I had stumbled onto something. Or more accurately, I felt I had stumbled upon a fairly significant absence of something, a silence where there should have been a clamour. 

A couple of racks over, toward the back of the store, I noticed some magazines I recognised and walked over. It was the environmental section. Here was the Earth in all her haemorrhaging. We all know the litany, and I can’t say it was easy reading. I found it data-heavy, too prone to viewing nature through the lens of science. What would happen, I wondered, if they looked through a poetic lens? What would that read like? I looked back over at the poetry stacks. Ten short paces away, yet a separate world. How did this happen? 

Was this split due somehow to the very growth and success of ‘environmentalism’? That is, was a kind of language and cultural split happening? Branching one way went the science-loving vernacular and politically engaged culture of environmentalism. Branching off in a different direction went the science-wary language and politically aloof culture of poetry.

Then I looked over and saw a cluster of magazines about woodworking, another about computers. There was an especially long section on cars and hot rods, but also a place for knitters, bass fishers and body builders, etc.

How odd it seemed. All these varied categories of human interest, each depending on the same invisible: nature. Without nature no wood to work, no wool to knit, no bass to catch, no body to build. And yet the awareness of and concern for this nature was concentrated and divided off into a tiny section near the back of the store. You may need nature, may breathe and be nature, but unless your individual identity includes ‘environmentalist’ you’re not likely to fight for it, let alone visit the little rack at the back of the store.

Our notion of wilderness is marked by an absence of fences. 

Wilderness begins where the fences end. And where wilderness ends is where the fences begin again, where the land becomes demarcated and divided, contained and tamed. What we don’t realise is this same thing is happening inside us. Perhaps within the human personality there once ranged something akin to wilderness, undefined by interests and ideologies, and perhaps there are places (indigenous communities, for instance) where that sort of personality still thrives. But in modern society we are as mapped and subdivided as the cities around us. When the editor stipulated no nature poems, please, who was stipulating what?

As time went on I noticed that no nature poems, please disappeared as a submission guideline from Poet’s Market. Perhaps some people like me complained. I continued to peruse the poetry stacks of the local magazine store. A friend gave me a subscription to Poets & Writers, a hefty bi-monthly with contest announcements and calls for submissions, notices for grants and awards, residencies and retreats, writer interviews, essays on craft, and lots of advertisements for the burgeoning MFA in Poetry industry. I also attended readings and went to the occasional poetry conference. Like this, I continued my very unscientific and purely observational research on the relations and interactions between poetry and the worsening condition of more-than-human nature.

Eventually, the plight of nature did seem to penetrate the editorial scaffold of the poetry establishment, though in a rather academic way. I began noticing MFA programs offerings special disciplines in things like ‘eco-poetics’ and ‘environmental literature’. The intention made sense, but I knew it would lead to yet more categorisation and division, more demarcation. As for a spirited defence of nature by poetry at large, I’ve yet to detect one.

Writer and translator Robert Bly describes just such a defence in his book News of The Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. 

In Europe, in the late 1700s and into the mid-1800s, the Cartesian split was spreading, with an increasingly analytical and utilitarian view of nature sweeping through the culture. Poets like William Blake, Novalis, Gerard De Nerval and Goethe fought back.

Free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker
on this earth in which life blazes inside all things?
Your liberty does what it wishes with the power it controls,
but when you gather to plan, the universe is not there.

– Gerard De Nerval, 1854

This movement has been lumped in with Romanticism, but Bly saw something more combative there. Bly saw poets agitating to defend the very divinity and integrity of nature, which was being systematically undermined by a system of rationality that Goethe described as ‘grey, monstrous and death-like […] as if facing a ghost.’

Is it time for a similar front now? Is it time for the warrior poet?

As for the present model, where science is the medium and scientific language the vernacular, the gap between nature and society is only widening. Indeed, like so much else these days, the model itself seems to be approaching collapse. 

‘And then we wept.’

– Professor Terry Hughes, head of the ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.

When Professor Hughes apprised his students of the results of his recent aerial surveys of the Great Barrier Reef, there was nothing for them to do but weep. The research showed the reef was clearly dying, becoming a white ghost under the strangely warm waters. 

Science is supposed to be impassive about its subject. So when marine biologists come to tears over their data, you could say the scientific method, and the language it uses, is brushing up against its own limits. For where do you go from there? Launch another study? Gather more data?

I suspect this isn’t an isolated event. There is likely much private weeping amongst scientists confronting incomprehensible loss while expected to maintain an air of cool objectivity. In his film How to Let Go of the World and Love Everything Climate Can’t Change, Josh Fox interviews a number of leading experts about the harrowing realities surrounding climate collapse and related extinction. They include Michael Mann, whose climate research led to the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph; Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute; and Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Great Extinction: An Unnatural History. The most telling part of the interviews isn’t in the information these experts convey, but in the silence each one eventually trails off into, eyes looking away or down, as though at an abyss.

It is a heart-gripping silence, and their faces tell a story their data can’t. What can speak into such a silence? What can bring meaning to it and offer pathways not for the analysing intellect, but the suffering soul? When science is struck dumb, who picks up the narrative?

I think humans have always needed some sort of intermediary, a medium say, between the human and non-human. In ancient times, and still in indigenous cultures, that medium was a shamanic figure and, more loosely, the medium consisted of stories and rituals which regularly renewed the flow of regard and reciprocation between human and non-human. Eventually civilisation appointed science as the medium. But, as we see, science – like the Earth – has limits. 

*

Is the answer to no nature poems, please more nature poems, please? I don’t think so. That’s too simplistic, and it still leaves us with the false category of the ‘nature poem’. I think it’s something more like this – tear down the walls, break up the categories, open the channels. Allow poetry to flow into science, science into prayer, prayer into nature, nature into poetry, and around and around let it go. Interpenetration is in the nature of things. We could use some now amongst the ranks of disciplines which clamour to explain the world to us: science, environmentalism, politics, psychology, religion etc. 

It would be nice for us to all breathe the same air for once, not different versions of it – the scientist’s version, a combination of gasses; the environmentalist’s version, a combination of gasses requiring protection and regulation; the politician’s version, something the ‘environmental voter’ cares about; the psychologist’s version, something which when breathed properly can help reduce anxiety; the religious version, something God gave us (presumably to poison and corrupt?); the poet’s version – ah, here is where it gets interesting.

In his essay ‘Nature’, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes walking down a country lane outside Boston amongst twenty or thirty farms. ‘Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape.’ There is only one, he says, ‘whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.’ The poet, beholden to no particular category, is the natural integrator and, by the same logic, the natural barrier breaker. Perhaps this is why poetry seems to resist environmentalism. It doesn’t want to own one farm or another. It wants the freedom to own the whole landscape. How strange that this freedom now makes it indispensable to the very institutions it tries to avoid.

Society needs the poet right now. It is an age of irony and reversals and this is one of them. If we have forgotten what air is, have lost sight of its divine formula – plant and animal breathing life into each other – who but the poet to remind us? If we have lost our enchantment with nature, who but the poet to re-enchant us, to retune our senses to nature’s hidden energies and mysteries? For every scientific explanation of nature, there is a poetic explanation. And it’s the poetic explanation the human narrative now requires.

The practice of poetry brings certain standards: a deeper intensity of observation, the freedom to see the sacred anywhere and everywhere, the courage of heart-seeing, the determination to make words meet their subjects with fidelity and power. Useful qualities for a craft that tries so assiduously not to be useful.

But it’s not just human society that needs the poet, it’s societies of birds and reptiles, forests and coral reefs. Nature, slowly collapsing into silence, calls out louder than ever for the poet. Now we all need what the poet brings: the broken-open hearts of words, the wild articulation, the howl.

IMAGE:

Kit Boyd
Another World
Etching and aquatint

‘Inspired by the Antony and the Johnsons song of the same title, this elegiac image of an imaginary landscape distils the essence of the British countryside I love into another world. Finding refuge in the subconscious, I create images that are a balm to the harsh reality of our modern lives, and which I hope lead the viewer down winding paths into a protective, womb-like environment.’

Kit Boyd lives and works in London and shows at galleries across the UK. Before becoming a full-time artist, he worked for many years for the Campaign to Protect Rural England and then the Council for the Protection of Rural Wales. He maintains strong links with Mid Wales where he gained his degree in Visual Art and has recently lived. His work follows in the British romantic tradition and is inspired by neo-romantic artists of the 1940s and Samuel Palmer.

Dark Mountain: Issue 10 – Uncivilised Poetics (PDF)

The Autumn 2016 edition is a special issue that explores the importance of poetry and the poetic.

Read more