16 Oct 23 EcoPoetry #01

EcoPoetry: Poems from Our Planet’s Heart

Suddenly! Suddenly! The news is everywhere. A year ago, the subject was typically relegated to the back pages and the occasional cover of magazines like Discover. As far as being news, this topic was an “also ran” in contrast with 2023 when it is, so to speak, topping the charts.

Climate Change is the topic referred to above. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Today with this post, we move on to a new focus for Monday poetry. We have spent months examining and hopefully enjoying “Poetic Spirits,” profiles of some of most influential poets of their times. You may have found those posts somewhat dated, and you would be correct. Today we decidedly move to more current times. In short, to EcoPoetry. Heard of it? If not, you will know quite a bit about it if you read this post to its end.

EcoPoetry is poetry with a strong ecological emphasis or message. Many poets, poems and books of poems have expressed ecological concerns; but only recently has the term ecopoetry gained use. There is now, in English-speaking poetry, a recognizable subgenre by this name. Prior to the term, a number of poets wrote with the intention of sending ecological messages. Although these poets did not mention the word, they were clearly "Ecopoetic" in stance and they exerted an influence on the subsequent subgenre. One of the fundamental premises of ecopoetics is derived from an ideological perspective that reality operates through interdependent systems, i.e., ecology. One of the terms used in science to describe living designs is “self-organizing systems".* This view sees everything in living relationship where everything exists as non-oppositional; we are challenged to view everything in relationship! This means the writing is made of an ecosystem and is distinctive in that its characteristics relate to one another. So, the writing itself is in relationship, just as are the ecopoetic themes.

The description above is, of course, quite esoteric. Now let’s home in on ecopoetic writing, remembering that both themes and the work of art are replete with relationships. We’ll start with what is closest to us: animal species. Like humans, animals are already feeling (and dying) the effects of climate change, as this phenomenon rages around the planet. We all feel the burning, the drowning, and the life-sapping effects of climate change. We all feel pain – science tells us that even plants suffer.

Climate change currently affects at least 10,967 species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™, increasing the likelihood of their extinction. Examples of animals affected include the polar bear, snow leopard, giant panda, tiger, monarch butterfly, and the green sea turtle. These represent a miniscule portion of living species. We have already caused the extinction of between an estimated 7.5-13 percent of species before the year 1500 C.E., and many more will go extinct because of climate change. Climate change is likely to wipe out many of the over 40,000 species on the IUCN Red List, a measure of endangered species. Other reports tell us that by about 2050 heat levels will increase to the point beyond human tolerance reaching catastrophic mortality rates in places such as Pakistan, South Asia, and large parts of Africa.

Poets of many nations and dispositions have responded with anger, compassion, helplessness, and courage to this deadly situation. Today, we have selected two poets and two each of their poems as representatives of the Ecopoem movement

James Dickey:

• For the Last Wolverine
• Heaven of Animals

Robinson Jeffers:

• Hurt Hawks
• The House-Dog’s Grave

“For the Last Wolverine” is a painful poem to read. Just as Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks,” the Wolverine suffers without knowing why, pushing on its way to extinction.

“The Heaven of Animals” is a metaphor for the timelessness of life on earth. It is not about the immortality of individuals but the immortality of species. If any genesis is suggested, it is the continuous “genesis” of life and generation. As Joan Bobbitt wrote in Concerning Poetry, Dickey “sees civilization as so far removed from nature, its primal antecedent, that only grotesque aberrations can aptly depict their relationship and, as he implies, possibly restore them to harmony and order.” Dickey’s poetry seeks to depict man’s proper relationship with nature. “Dickey makes it clear,” suggested Bobbitt, “that what seems to be unnatural is only so because of its context in a civilized world, and that these deviations actually possess a vitality which modern man has lost.

“Hurt Hawks” by Robinson Jeffers is a beautiful poem that describes the proud strength of an injured hawk forced to live out its last weeks in pain. The poem takes the reader through the fate of an injured hawk that, unable to fly, cannot sustain itself.

Who knows why the hawk is injured – a speeding truck, agricultural poison – something near certainly, human created. – but without hospitals and ambulances to whisk us off for medical ministrations

Finally, and eminently close to home, we have “The House-Dog’s Grave,” a risky poem given its notable sentimentality. Jeffers was generally excoriated for the sentimentality of this poem, something his readers didn't expect from him, but should have.  

* Self-organization refers to a broad range of pattern-formation processes in both physical and biological systems, such as sand grains assembling into rippled dunes, chemical reactants forming swirling spirals, cells making up highly structured tissues, and fish joining together in schools. 

POEMS

Allow me to begin with my number one pick for an EcoPoem about rare sentient beings – becoming rapidly more rare: James Dickey’s “For the Last Wolverine.” There are those sensitive enough to ferret out Dickey’s message: the close proximity of extinction is a universal condition. The species of sentient beings that inhabit the planet are winking out one by one and hundreds by hundreds at a pace so rapid that conservation efforts are only plausible for the hardiest and most dedicated.

For the Last Wolverine

by James L. Dickey

They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be

For a little while    still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,

Surrounding himself with the silence

Of whitening snarls. Let him eat

The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough

For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and from it, have an idea

Stream into his gnarling head

That he no longer has a thing

To lose, and so can walk

Out into the open, in the full

Pale of the sub-Arctic sun

Where a single spruce tree is dying

Higher and higher. Let him climb it

With all his meanness and strength.

Lord, we have come to the end

Of this kind of vision of heaven,

As the sky breaks open

Its fans around him and shimmers

And into its northern gates he rises

Snarling    complete    in the joy of a weasel

With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach

Looking straight into the eternal

Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World’s last eagle

Hunched in mangy feathers    giving

Up on the theory of flight.

Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate

To the death in the rotten branches,

Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come

Of it    something gigantic    legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills

Of ice    SCREAMING    that it cannot die,

That it has come back, this time

On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:

That it will hover, made purely of northern

Lights, at dusk    and fall

On men building roads: will perch

On the moose’s horn like a falcon

Riding into battle    into holy war against

Screaming railroad crews: will pull

Whole traplines like fibres from the snow

In the long-jawed night of fur trappers.

But, small, filthy, unwinged,

You will soon be crouching

Alone, with maybe some dim racial notion

Of being the last, but none of how much

Your unnoticed going will mean:

How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage,

The glutton’s internal fire    the elk’s

Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing

Thing,” with himself, to eat

The world, and not to be driven off it

Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,

Skunk-bear, carcajou*, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

                        Lord, let me die    but not die

Out.

The Heaven of Animals

by James L. Dickey

Here they are. The soft eyes open.   

If they have lived in a wood

It is a wood.

If they have lived on plains

It is grass rolling

Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,   

Anyway, beyond their knowing.   

Their instincts wholly bloom   

And they rise.

The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,   

Outdoing, desperately

Outdoing what is required:

The richest wood,

The deepest field.

For some of these,

It could not be the place

It is, without blood.

These hunt, as they have done,

But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.   

They stalk more silently,

And crouch on the limbs of trees,   

And their descent

Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years

In a sovereign floating of joy.   

And those that are hunted   

Know this as their life,

Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge   

Of what is in glory above them,   

And to feel no fear,

But acceptance, compliance.   

Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle’s center,

They tremble, they walk   

Under the tree,

They fall, they are torn,   

They rise, they walk again.

Hurt Hawks

by Robinson Jeffers

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,

The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine

And pain a few days: cat nor coyote

Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits

The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom

And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

The curs of the day come and torment him   

At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those

That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;

Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;

Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,

Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

The House-Dog's Grave

by Robinson Jeffers

I've changed my ways a little; I cannot now

Run with you in the evenings along the shore,

Except in a kind of dream; and you,

If you dream a moment,

You see me there.

 

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door

Where I used to scratch to go out or in,

And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor

The marks of my drinking-pan.

 

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do

On the warm stone,

Nor at the foot of your bed; no,

All the nights through I lie alone.

 

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet

Outside your window where firelight so often plays,

And where you sit to read‚

And I fear often grieving for me‚

Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

 

You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard

To think of you ever dying.

A little dog would get tired, living so long.

I hope that when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear

As good and joyful as mine.

 

No, dears, that's too much hope:

You are not so well cared for as I have been.

And never have known the passionate undivided

Fidelities that I knew.

Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided...

But to me you were true.

 

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.

I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures

To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,

I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

Background

The wolverine may have experienced significant population declines or local extirpations in the Cascade Range and northern Rocky Mountains during the early 1900s, as has been speculated. Between 1921 and 1950, there is only one wolverine record from Washington, one from Oregon, five from Idaho, thirteen from Montana, and one from Wyoming. However, records from these states in subsequent years were relatively numerous, suggesting that wolverine populations may have become reestablished in northwestern regions after a period of range-wide decline.

The most recent verifiable record of wolverine occurrence in California dates from 1922, in Utah from 1921, in Colorado from 1919, and in Minnesota from 1899; the only documented record from any of these states during either recent (1961–1994) or current (1995–2005) time periods is one from northeastern Minnesota in 1965. Given the extent to which these areas have been surveyed for wolverines and other forest carnivores, and the concerted efforts made by resource management agencies and conservation organizations to compile occurrence records of rare and elusive forest carnivores, the lack of verifiable records in these states for >80 years provides compelling evidence that the wolverine has been extirpated from those portions of its historical range.

Exploration 1: From what you know of poetry, do you think EcoPoetry is a valid subgenre? Either way, does it have a place among other types of poetic genre?

Exploration 2: Read the following passage and decide if Dickey’s work is appropriate for a poet. In other words, should a poet be engaged in critiquing the civilized world in contrast to the natural world?

Exploration 3: Does sentimentality have a place in EcoPoetry?