ENVIRONMENTALIST POETRY

Well, I'm half-way through my poem (F O T O), so it's time for some indulgence. While I've been working on it, I've been reflecting on how my values affect the kind of poetry I write.

I suppose the title to this essay suggests something like

It isn't good to cut down trees
or make them catch some vile disease...

but that isn't what I'm talking about, even though preachy poetry can be good.

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled....

...Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve;
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. ...

I think Binsey Poplars is the only poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I like unreservedly.

Did I say "preachy"? - but also elegiac. Is environmentalist poetry of necessity a poetry of loss, impotence and despair? What can a poet, however in love with nature, do against the forces of the multinationals? Such poetry would reflect the bitter moods of environmentalist books like Silent Spring, The End of Nature, Arctic Dreams.

Bitterness is good. But to me it's only an ingredient. The nature that I love is being destroyed, yes, but also: it still exists. The destroyer of nature (the human, the chain-saw...) is also part of nature, although behaving in a warped way, like a tree root constrained by paving-slabs. So I can't feel a simple emotion about these things. For instance:

Rallarrosen - "the navvy's rose"

No trace now of the anxious, sprawling camps,
no clanking barrows, no chinking hammer, no men.

Empty land, but alive. The unsweet roses
throw a blast of silent plumes after the train.

(F O T O, 34)

The bitterness is registered in the "empty gesture" of the "roses" (in fact they are rosebay willowherbs). But this is actually a human construction, because the willowherb prospers by the slipstream of the train spreading its seeds. It's the army of navvies who worked on this unprecedented engineering triumph (the Luleå - Narvik line to carry ore to the West) who seem a century later to be victims. Is triumph quite the right word for the gross blot of Malmberget, or for Narvik's transformation into somewhere that was "important" enough to attract Nazi occupation and terror? Is "silent" nature friendly to us, or only when we compel it? We live in houses held up by RSJs, we put stainless steel in our mouths, we walk out to the car confident that the wheels won't drop off (well, fairly confident). There are reasons to be involved in such questions, if we choose to be.

I think the outward form of my poems is descriptive rather than preachy or elegiac. But after all one is not always describing offences against nature. Is there a sense in which environmentalist values embed themselves in the poetry, whatever it is I'm talking about? This is what really preoccupies me.

(And here I don't want to imply that all people who care about nature in fact share exactly the same values, or that anyone holds them unchangingly. But I can sketch some possibilities.)

I think of human beings as animals. In earlier times the word "animal" was strongly pejorative, it correlated with Victorian words we hardly use any more like "beast", "brute", "savage", "coarse", "gross" etc. This set of ideas is part of the language of colonialist racialism, also apparently used as euphemisms for talking about rape. (Or was it really to persuade women from going anywhere near a male of a lower social class?) Then those frightening Darwinists and behaviourists and Viennese psycho-analysts came along and shocked liberal society by claiming (in their different ways) that human beings were more or less nothing but animals in this bestial and pejorative sense. Liberal society never could accept that, but nevertheless we all became more used to the idea, it became less shocking with time. This perhaps imperfectly grasped "science" has influenced the environmentalist, but we no longer see the equation of human with animal as a reduction of human dignity. Deeply influential (if "mystick" and "wacky") movements in the '60s have, on the contrary, elevated our idea of the animal and the natural. Yes, we hug trees, if only metaphorically. Supporters of Earth First! and the like draw the legal corollary that the human species has no special rights over other species - but at this point the politics begins to move us away from what seems relevant to poetry, except perhaps inasmuch as it casts doubt on human conventions such as property and legality itself, dangerous waters as German blood-and-soil movements discovered in the '30s.

To view and describe the human being as an animal is, I think necessarily, to develop a somewhat anti-cultural view. I want to focus on what is "really" happening when (for instance) a mother holds a toddler's hand, or when I take my shirt off. Inevitably, looking at these activities from their animal perspective, the first thing I want to throw away is the vast coercive system of what imposed human culture says that these ordinary experiences ought to mean. (You see that I am drawn to subject-matter that is commonly regarded as "unintellectual", but the distinction between the intellectual and the "merely" sensual is itself an imposition of culture.)

Shirt off by the fall

Unmuted, my skin rubs up against the world:
coarse prickles of treeish debris;

swirls in the air; warm, flat butt of stone;
splish - two, three drops crawl on my belly.

(F O T O, 43)

Here I wanted to express the sensuality, the freedom, the exciting discomfort of being naked outside. But in order to do so it seemed necessary to shift cultural baggage out of the way. This is very insidious because it is stitched into our languages, and sometimes many re-drafts are necessary. For instance, the "treeish debris" was originally a specification of the dry fruits and warty twigs shed by birch-trees. But skin doesn't recognize those specifics, and they bring in cultural associations (weeping birches on lawns, dry fruit = barren?, warty = infected?) that, under the guise of information, are actually distortions. The slovenly, demotic "treeish debris" is in the end much less cluttered.

If a poetic is at a deep level anti-cultural, this causes some technical problems. It's one thing to eliminate journalistspeak, mediaspeak, companyspeak, etc. Most poets do that, more or less. But a poem itself is a cultural artefact, the inheritor of a noble tradition which some (e.g Eliot) have said that a good poem should be "conscious" of. Of course I love and value that tradition. Do I try to eliminate all dependence or reference to Shakespeare, Coleridge, Edith Södergran, Tomas Tranströmer? And this is not easy, for I don't regard poetic culture as a small dusty by-way of culture, on the contrary I fully share Shelley's belief that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Just as it is said that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, so those who don't know the poetic tradition simply inhabit it and parrot it unconsciously. For example, those who queue to see Phantom Menace are in effect living out what Scott (and, of course, others) originated.

Human activity is, from an environmentalist perspective, both a natural and a destructive process. Our activity is animal activity, an instinctive flexing of mammalian muscles. As a fellow-human and a poet, I celebrate it. But because it leads to production, economic growth, war and other things that I regard mainly in a negative light, it is also destructive. Reluctant, however, to go all the way with cultural schemes of good and bad activity (of course, these are numerous), I'm left with an unresolved paradox.

Yelling in the hills

T I L L ! Even the greatest bomb dies into silence...
Y O U ! How briskly she folds down the blankets on uproar
F I N D ! & back slips peace; but fight it baby
Y O U R ! & prove your lyric, sing out: show we've more.

(F O T O, 48)

My friend, singing "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" at the top of her voice, infects me with excitement. I too long to combat inertia and silence, show what we can do. At the same time the thought of silence is restful, like a mother quieting her children as she puts them to bed. And the same animal impulse that produces songs produces bombs, which also die into silence: perhaps a reassuring thought, perhaps a sinister one.

An unresolved paradox is a problem in logic, not necessarily in poetry. What the environmentalist view does to action in poetry is accord it a peculiar kind of weight. It matters.

Recycling is an activity of most environmentally-concerned people. It amounts to the prolongation of a product-lifecycle: at best, re-use (e.g. second-hand jeans); failing that, repair, renewal, or finally recycling in the narrow sense (freeing up as much of the original resource as possible, e.g. composting). It is easy to make recycling seem a boring sideline, a process of damage limitation, a brake on the environmental cost of new production, a grave but unheroic and tedious duty. The teenager, bursting with energy and ownership of the future, who throws her/his empty drinks-can on the sidewalk expresses her/his magnificent disdain for the petty mediocrity of those who patiently collect for the clothes-bank and the bottle-bank.

And yet recycling expresses a wonderfully positive philosophy. It asserts the value, not just the cost, of what has already been made. It asserts that human ingenuity can make something more (or at any rate make the most) of what humans have produced. The product becomes an inheritance, it becomes sanctified. There is to some degree a communion across time, a social bond, between the past producer and the recycler.

Human production is not only destructive in the present, it is melancholy if its future is meditated: waste, ruins. But the recycler counters those emotions (so lovingly explored by poets) of melancholy and transience.

These are perhaps rather excessive thoughts to apply to an empty can of Lilt. Communion! I mean who was the past producer, for Christ's sake? A fuckin machine! We're not talking about a hand-knitted jumper...

Quite true, products have different initial values, mass-produced packaging is vastly depersonalized and impoverished in terms of human value. Nevertheless, from whatever starting-value the tendency of recycling is to enhance it. These jeans I'm wearing were mass-produced, the original purchaser paid the cost price and that pretty much represented their (gradually diminishing) value to him. But to me, who found them by chance in a charity shop, and who paid so much less, the value is growing as they have been found to be a great fit, durable, comfortable... they were a "discovery", they have a mini-story behind them, in short they have become a "possession" not merely in a legal sense but in a treasured sense: "my things". Even when they fall apart, I won't experience that Virgilian sense of waste and loss (melancholy, transience, etc), it'll be tempered by a sense that anyway I got them more or less free, and that the world required one less unit of denim and dye as a consequence.

In the cafe/junkshop, Överkalix - for Rachel

Drawers striped with dust, old annuals, kettles, handles;
a tea-mist forms, but you'd brighten it Rachel,

you who quarry the auction browns with warm eyes,
no sentiment of loss. Everything's up for renewal.

(F O T O, 52)

A poem can in some sense be "environmentalist" without being directed at "nature", at something "over there". Environmentalist values also change the way we perceive human beings, human actions and human products.

How, finally, do such values affect the form of my poetry? Here, the influence that immediately occurs to me is my constant awareness of over-population.

There is too much of everything human. Too many people, obviously, but also too much noise, too many cars, too much Lilt, too many hospital dramas, streetlights, flyovers, lawn-mowers, books, crisps, banks...It's an emotion rather than a belief, and I wouldn't want to justify it or dignify it by suggesting it's part of the standard-issue environmentalist mind-set. But I have it.

Well, if there are too many books then the obvious conclusion is don't write poetry. Naturally, I haven't quite been prepared to face up to that! Nevertheless, it links to a preference for poetry over, say, blockbuster novels. Poetry is the most concise of all literary forms, the barest art in materials (apart from dancing) -- and, fairly evidently, my poems tend to be concise. It's also an art that entails little material production and minimal economic growth. Written and published electronically, even paper is not used.

I don't use a free or organic form in my poems, which might seem a paradox. I didn't plan it, but I think the idea is that a stable, "rectangular" form works like a window or the oblong frame of a photograph. In order for you to see the trees clearly through a window, the window itself needs to be as unlike a tree as possible. A window needs a certain monotonous regularity. It can be paned or leaded, but if it is full of irregular shapes it becomes a distraction to seeing. I don't want to merge form and content, I regard them as wholly distinct, the one necessarily cultural, the other natural and real. This runs counter to much modern poetic theory and practice ("The medium is the message" etc). It also explains why, again unlike much modern poetry, the poems are unconcerned with the artistic process, they are not poems about poems or writing about writing. Philosophically and scientifically it is doubtless naive to posit a "real" subject with such distinctness. Personally, it's inevitable. Environmentalists love nature (= reality), and when you love something its reality is what you assert.