JONATHAN SKINNER / WHY ECOPOETICS?
ecopoetics volume 1

I’m getting a little tired of ecopoetics, volume 1. I’ve been living with it a long time. I’m eager to move on to CECILIA VICUÑA, and then volume 2, but I am stalled on Jonathan Skinner’s essay.

Why stalled? It is a cerebral challenge. It is a thought piece. I swirl in thoughts when engaged only in that part of the body. I strive too hard to achieve brilliance and inescapably true conclusions. I want to weave together the thought strands of the whole world into one pinnacle flag that will declare me the winner.

Heh. Not possible, is it.

I thought about composing this piece as a letter, a response. I got tired. I let it gestate too long in my head. It got rotten.

A component: I am very tired of the way everyone in contemporary poetry has to engage with “Language” writing and the issue of accessibility or difficulty. I don’t even want to say anything about this. I want to just let it evolve. Time will tell. Or I may say “Time is on my side.”

A component: Reading “On Whitman” at the same time I was hanging with this essay. Whitman I would call “accessible.” (There it is again.) He also took walks. The thought occurred to me: “Has Whitman ruined poetry for everyone to follow him?” The answer cannot be Yes. But we certainly cannot write in that exalted, optimistic, spiritually engaged mode anymore – or can we? Is it time for the poetry of the apocalypse? Whitman wrote through the Civil War years. It must have seem’d that it was over. Yet he dug in and claimed a poetry of tremendous energy, emotion, and optimism.

A question: Can Whitman’s poetry and Jonathan Skinner’s essay co-exist in the same mental space?

A thought: Can ecopoetry be written by a person sitting in a room, a person who never leaves the house?

A skepticism: I’m not sure I buy the idea of a cross-species poetics.

That’s all I have to say right now. To let Skinner have his say:

All of these directions may complicate, enrich or hopelessly muddle the writing of poetry at the start of a new millenium; they may mistake the very meaning of the human; certainly there is no guarantee of success. (106)

illuminated sign on the side of the highway

R O O A D W O K
O N N . Y. S.
G S P K W Y

M O N – F R I
7 A M
5 P M

I would take a photo of it if I weren’t zooming by at 50+ miles an hour

30 miles
started at Jackie Robinson Park W 147th Street
had to backtrack to get around the park
(cycling up a hill better than carrying your bike up steep stairs at 155th)
bit of trouble finding the bike path along the Harlem River
but there are some beautiful uncrowded spots for picnicking there

city streets (Dyckman) for a few blocks
to intersect with the beginning of the west side bike path

main challenges: heat, various sore body parts, crowds
but on the whole, pleasant interesting riding

one more challenge: darkness, being caught in
had to navigate from 181st street back to 147th in the dark
double parked cars, car with flat tire bumping along,
buses pulling across the bike lane, other cyclists, many pedestrians

reward: dinner at Celeste, 84th and Amsterdam
not a fan of fried food, but I loved the fried artichokes topped off
with a frothy pile of fried parsley!

map only gives a vague idea of the route
for one thing, it’s showing driving directions, not bike routes
for another, it doesn’t show the return trip, which included a short cut at the end

View Manhattan West Side in a larger map

8 miles
just a short bit of Bike New York‘s Discover the Hudson Valley Ride
from Dutchess County Community College start
over the Walkway over the Hudson, former railroad bridge outside Poughkeepsie
took shelter with six or seven other cyclists on the other side while it poured rain
then scooted back over the bridge again and ended the ride soaking wet

rain all day today
it makes the outdoors seem alive

walkway soars 212 feet above the Hudson River
fear of heights kept me from looking down, or even much to the right or left
how to do it: count pedal strokes and stare straight ahead
strict discipline of mental activity being necessary to ride across that bridge

“In the seen, only the seen.” (not the imagined, i.e., somehow tumbling over the side of the bridge into the river)
Bahiya Sutta

Still contemplating “place” with Stephen Batchelor’s Confession of a Buddhist Atheist as guide.

One needs to make a conscious shift from delight in a fixed place to awareness of a contingent ground. (Confession, p. 156)

This statement is relevant to vacationers and eco-poets. Your place may get corrupted, or even disappear like the Maldives.

Interesting that Thoreau used the term “ground” (previous post).

Whereas a place can tie you down and close you off, this ground lets you go and opens you up. It does not stand still for a moment. To be supported by it, you have to be with it in a different way. Instead of standing firmly on your feet and holding on tight with both hands in order to feel secure in your place, here you have to dart across its liquid, shimmering surface like a long-legged fly, swim with its current like a fast-moving fish. (Confession, p 128-9).

Is it fair to apply a spiritual concept to poetics? I think so. Some poets of place may effectively express this shimmering sort of contingent groundedness, and others may not. I would like to be able to point to examples.

From The Journal, 1837-1861, Henry David Thoreau, page 9:

The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground.

Online sources like Wikiquote continue with the sentence “It has a logic more severe than the logician’s.” But I like better the mysterious sentence that follows in the abridgement I am reading:

Its eccentric and unexplored orbit embraces the system.

What is the orbit?
What is the system?

Also love this amusing (though still mysteriously abridged) fragment from page 14:

Jan. 10. A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare. Sometimes I read one which was written while the world went round, while grass grew and water ran.

Did he consider that one healthy or not?

Traveled to the Brooklyn Museum yesterday to view Kiki Smith’s exhibit “Sojourn.”

Formal review? No. Reactions? Yes.

Nepal paper. Flimsy (in a good way).

No frames. Intimacy. Pages pasted up against the wall?

Were these sheets of paper taped together? The drawings are quite large, almost life-size.

Somehow the paper comes forward and interrupts the line. Fascinating. As though the figure were embedded in the paper and coming forward, or the paper was obliterating the figure, not sure which.

Paying special attention to the eyes, hands, and feet. The eyes of the central figure were especially piercing, carefully drawn, dark and not obscured. Looking toward the left. In two panels, this figure left her reading glasses on the chair. (Smiled.)

Floors looking like rubbing of wood grain. Some of the figures floated above the floor. Chairs a primary motif.

Delicacy, flimsiness, glitter, ephemerality. Feminine qualities. I am reminded of a graphic design class I took, where I produced some homework that was clearly feminine. Teacher’s comment – could this student come up with something more masculine? My thought – why?

Nothing can make me not enjoy glitter.

I did not enjoy the paintings of flowers, however. Skipped right over them to focus on the drawings of women. I also liked the little off-kilter papier-mache chairs very much. The birds. The light bulbs.

Detail of a drawing. The hands look like they are turning into wood, or into a furry animal’s hands. They are not clutching the leaves and flowers, but are rather draped around them. These hands belong to a possibly dying, possibly ailing woman, accompanied quietly by another woman at her bedside.

Another moving detail: eyes obliterated by a paste-on set of lids with clumsily cut lashes. Almost invisible unless you looked very closely.

Why would the artist obliterate the eyes? A blindness? An inward-looking? A sensation of being tired of sense perceptions, tired of looking? This gesture felt extremely satisfying to me though, especially after observing all the piercing and/or vacant eyes on previous panels. A gesture of extraordinary privacy.