TY - JOUR
AU1 - Hart, George
AB - A. R. Ammons was on a roll in 1963. He published new poems in Poetry magazine in June of that year, “Corsons Inlet” appeared in the summer issue of The Hudson Review (under its original title, “A Nature Walk”), and his second book, Expressions of Sea Level, was issued by the Ohio State University Press (his first one was self-published eight years prior). Ammons has long been celebrated as a major American poet, and he has also long enjoyed the reputation as one of our preeminent poets of ecology.1 His poems of the late fifties and early sixties are still to this day seen as highpoints of postwar “ecopoetry,” and “Corsons Inlet,” which became the title poem of his next volume in 1965, is often considered the highest of these summits.2 Larry Eigner was doing pretty well in the early sixties, too. He was included as a Black Mountain poet in Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), and his first major collection, On My Eyes, with an introductory note by Denise Levertov, was published by Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Society in 1962. On My Eyes was reviewed that year by Galway Kinnell in the September issue of Poetry magazine, which also included six of Eigner’s poems. Poetry was a reliable outlet for Eigner throughout the decade, as it was for Ammons, publishing his poems in various issues in 1964, 1965, and 1969. Although Eigner’s work never achieved the prominence of Ammons’s, and has only begun to receive attention from ecocritics, it deserves to be placed alongside the more familiar work for its similar approach to ecopoetic form. In fact, Poetry magazine was something of a proving ground for ecopoetics in the 1960s, publishing the increasingly ecologically aware poetry of Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Wendell Berry, and Lorine Niedecker, as well as Ammons, Eigner, and others throughout the decade.3 Contemporary environmental activism also began in this decade, kickstarted by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and it is at the intersection of postmodern poetry and the advent of the ecology movement that ecopoetic form first becomes visible. Joshua Schuster observes, Carson materializes the ecological mantra that all life is interconnected not just by indicating how one species is inextricably linked with another but also by showing how pollution in location gets distributed across many places on the planet. Interconnection is also about how industries are inseparable from science, the lives of animals are inseparable from human consumer habits, and ecosystem dynamics are inseparable from cross-species affective webs of sympathy and disregard, well-being and disability, outrage and fear. (134) Interconnectedness is the lesson of Silent Spring, and it so profoundly seized the popular imagination that Carson’s book led to major policy changes and the creation of governmental organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency. Furthermore, again according to Schuster, it changed what it meant to be “ecological”: “For Carson, becoming ecological means working through crisis and critique, rather than longing for an untouched wilderness or a pristine, pure past existence” (134). Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology, “everything is connected to everything else,” is the popular expression of ecopoetics’s core principle of interconnectedness, which Timothy Morton dubs the “mesh”: “The ecological thought imagines interconnectedness, which I call the mesh” (Ecological Thought 15). In trying to write, or in the case of both Ammons and Eigner, to type, the mesh, these poets invent contemporary ecopoetic form. It is one of the paradoxes of ecopoetics that Ammons and Eigner compose their poems on manual typewriters, pieces of machine-age technology. But, as I will argue, ecopoetics does not exclude technology from its purview, but rather acknowledges it as an integral part of its process. Eigner’s use of the typewriter is pretty much mandatory—his cerebral palsy made handwriting and speaking very difficult. Here’s how he described his typing in an interview: [W]ith only my right index finger to type with I never could write very fast—to say what I want to when I think of it, before I forget it or how to say it; I sometimes say 2 things at about the same time, in two columns. It’ll be from not deciding or being unable to decide quickly anyway what to say first, or next. (Areas 149) And, making a virtue of necessity, Eigner accepts the results of this lack of coordination as integral aspects of his poetry: In general, the indents and other spacings became distancing, not in a derived way, but directly realized. And I like to avoid the formal or deadset appearance that you get when you have one line or word beginning right below another, flush with it. The less you have that, the more easily a piece can rise up off the page—the typography less imposing, intrusive. (Areas 150) At the center of Eigner’s ecopoetics, then, there is a machine, and it plays a large role in the appearance, the visual shape, of his poems. Although not based in a disability, Ammons’s practice on the typewriter is very similar to Eigner’s. In a Paris Review interview with David Lehman, Ammons says, My poems begin on the typewriter. If I’m home—and I rarely write anything elsewhere—I write on an Underwood standard upright, manual, not electric, which I bought used in Berkeley in 1951 or 1952. It had been broken and rewelded. It’s worked without almost any attention for forty-four years…. I like the typewriter because it allows me to set up the shapes and control the space. Though I don’t care much for formality (in fact, I hate ceremony), I need to lend a formal cast, at least, to the motions I love so much. Form, in Ammons’s poems, is in part a function of the margins and spacing of the typewriter, just as it is for Eigner, and Ammons famously experimented with the formal effects of paper width in “Tape for the Turn of the Year,” composed on a roll of adding machine tape rather than standard 8 and 1/2 by 11 inch typing paper.4 Lehman follows up: I have this picture of you taking long walks along places mentioned in your poems, such as Cascadilla Falls here in Ithaca or Corsons Inlet on the New Jersey shore, and writing as you were walking, writing out something longhand. Ammons: Or memorizing it in your head. Lehman: Did you do that? Ammons: Yes, oh yes. Not something as long as “Corsons Inlet,” but shorter poems. I’ve done that here in Ithaca and down there many times Lehman: “Corsons Inlet” is a hundred and twenty-eight lines long. Did you write it at the end of the long walk described in the poem? Ammons: Yes, and at one sitting. So, Ammons may memorize a poem as it occurs to him in situ, but the visual appearance of that text is not determined until he sits down at the typewriter. In other words, for Ammons and Eigner ecopoetics is textualist—a poem’s form, or perhaps it is better to say its shape, only exists on the page, in typed letters and spaces, as a text (which, based on etymology, is another way of thinking about the mesh).5 The other shared element of Ammons’s and Eigner’s ecopoetics is the figure of “the walk,” or the process of walking, which, at least for Eigner, who mostly got around in a wheelchair, is another ecopoetic paradox. Eigner often analogized a poem to walking—“If you’re willing enough to stop anywhere, anytime, hindsight says, a poem can be like walking down a street and noticing things, extending itself without obscurity or too much effort” (Areas 25)—and Ammons codified his sense of this analogy in his essay “A Poem Is a Walk.” Poetry and walking have long been associated, especially in the romantic tradition, and the ambulatory analogy is a key figure of organic form.6 But the slight difference in phrasing is significant. Eigner says a poem is like walking and Ammons says a poem is a walk. In other words, even though ecopoetics is always a poetics of process, Ammons opts for the substantive while Eigner uses the gerund, putting greater emphasis on process. As I will argue, this notion of “a walk” both liberates and restricts the ecopoetic form of Ammons’s well known “Corsons Inlet”; in Eigner’s case, the idea of “walking down a street and noticing things” produces a more open ecopoetic form, and my main example will be Eigner’s 1965 poem “the music, the rooms.” I will start with Ammons as the more familiar of this pair. “Corsons Inlet” The June 1963 issue of Poetry also included Ammons’s “A Note on Prosody,” in which he writes, “I’ve noticed a few things in my verse lately that arouse my curiosity, and I wonder if they reflect important little real things that are happening to poetry or just willed nerve” (202). He then quotes a brief fragment of a poem from Expressions of Sea Level (“Close-Up”) and continues, “Here the box-like structure of rhymed, measured verse is pretty well shot” (202). Ammons contends that without rhyme and meter emphasis shifts to the beginning of the line, creating a different sense of movement in the poem: “a downward pull is created that gives a certain downward rush to the movement, something like a waterfall glancing in turn off opposite sides of the canyon, something like the right and left turns of a river” (202–03). He concludes, “these thoughts suggest that a non-linear movement is possible which uses both the beginning and the end of the line as glancing-off points, so that the movement is not across the page but actually, centrally down the page” (203). What Ammons outlines here is his version of “organic form” or “open form” poetry, an idea that was rapidly becoming the dominant approach to poetry in the sixties, a period when William Carlos Williams’s influence was rekindled among younger poets, Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” had become widely available through Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology, and the New Criticism’s rigorous formalism was being rejected by its erstwhile practitioners such as Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich. Ammons replaces traditional poetic form, the uniform line lengths and regulated line endings that produce a “box-like structure,” with the ideas of shape and motion. He offers an analogy from nature—it’s “like a waterfall”—but he is not naturalizing poetry in quite the same way as the romantic versions of organic form expressed by Keats or Emerson. It is what the poem does on the page that matters, not the forces or techniques that make it appear “like” nature or alive. As Stephen Cushman observes, For Ammons the natural and textual remain inseparable. Each figures the other completely. One of his poems about a detail in nature is also about itself, not in a crudely allegorical way, in which natural phenomena are reduced to mere signs for poetic processes, but in a richly figurative one that demonstrates how the operations of nature instruct and replicate themselves in the operations of poetic imagination, which in turn informs the perception of nature. (163) “Corsons Inlet” is an extended example of ecopoetic form produced by this prosody. Early in that poem, the speaker declares, “the walk liberating, I was released from forms,/from the perpendiculars,/straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds/of thought/into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight” (5). Inside the box of tradition or culture, the poet is cramped and confined; his escape to the dunes liberates his mind from these forms that block and bind, and allows it to participate in the flowing and blending of nature through sight rather than thought. Many years later, Ammons used “the walk” as another metaphor for organic form in an essay called “A Poem Is a Walk.” In this sense, “Corsons Inlet” is an example of ecopoetic form, for if, in Olson’s terms, form is an extension of content, the content of “Corsons Inlet” is its form (as I noted above, it was first titled “A Nature Walk”). John Elder describes the formal aspects of the poem this way: “Corsons Inlet” presents a thoroughly irregular verse form, with the wavering left margin responding to the eddies of perception. Ammons’s poetry does not line up and march but holds together in a dense, unhierarchical order of suspension, like a flock of seabirds wheeling above the surf. (145–46) Elder works with the same metaphors drawn from nature—perception is like a current that can drift in eddies, the poem holds together like a flock of seabirds—but how irregular is the form of “Corson’s Inlet”? Does the left margin waver? Does it really give us an “unhierarchical order”? If these are important aspects of ecopoetic form, and I believe they are, then they need to be interrogated more rigorously. Here is a slightly longer excerpt of the poem, its beginning movement partially quoted above: I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea, then turned right along  the surf      rounded a naked headland      and returned  along the inlet shore: it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high, crisp in the running sand,  some breakthroughs of sun  but after a bit continuous overcast: the walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars,   straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shading, rises, flowing bends and blends   of sight:      I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work: (Corsons 5) Thirteen out of the twenty-two lines quoted here are flush with the left margin. The indented lines do not follow standard “tab” spaces on the typewriter, so they are variable, but the left margin is still dominant. Is it nonhierarchical? The speaker attempts to “go with the flow,” such as it is, tries not to establish boundaries and set limits, so it is nonhierarchal in terms of the speaker’s rhetoric. But what about the form and language? The punctuation is irregular—idiosyncratic, in fact—and Ammons’s use of the colon is an attempt at nonhierarchical punctuation: no definitive stops, one thing flowing into the next, and so on. But there is still standard grammar and syntax, which means subordination along with all this coordination, and subordination requires hierarchical distinctions. Actually, following the colons as indicators of a longer poetic unit, it is not too difficult to find Whitmanesque strophes underneath Ammons’s fragmented, Williamsesque lineation (Elder, in fact, notes the use of the Whitmanian word “eddies” in the poem): I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea, then turned right along the surf rounded a naked headland and returned along the inlet shore: it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high, crisp in the running sand, some breakthroughs of sun but after a bit continuous overcast: the walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shading, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight: I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work: I think that this little experiment shows that a large part of ecopoetic form in “Corsons Inlet” is indeed what happens on the page—the poem must be seen to capture the sense of the downward movement, and, to mimic that motion, short lines are required. The motion is not part of the grammar or syntax; it is entirely a product of the visual layout of the lines. So, not unlike Williams’s technique in his objectivist lyrics of the twenties and thirties, Ammons here uses short lines, enjambment, and variable spacing to play against the otherwise standard grammar and syntax of the poem’s language.7 A major requirement for ecopoetic form is that language must be treated as one more component of the environmental content of the text.8 There is no transparent language in ecopoetic form because there is no transparent language in poetry.9 If language is part of the matter of the poem, then it too should be allowed some degree of freedom from form just as the speaker feels his freedom in his walk across the dunes. In this sense, as many critics observe about this poem, Ammons is seeking a balance between form and formlessness, mind and nature, thought and perception, but he may be tipping the scales a bit on the side of rational discourse.10 The speaker understands this, and before turning to the discreet particulars that he encounters on his walk, he indulges in a little more abstract thought. Picking up from the lines quoted above, the poem continues:   you can find in my sayings         swerves of action         like the inlet’s cutting edge:       there are dunes of motion,  organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance  in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:  but Overall is beyond me: (Corsons 5) Here is the dualism that motivates “Corsons Inlet.” How can perception (primarily visual in this case) be blended with thought without imposing mind on nature? How can one, as Ammons says in the conclusion, avoid the “humbling of reality to precept”? As a good postmodernist, Ammons rejects the idea of a totalizing form, an Overall once and for all, humbly acknowledging his own ineptness in making such an “accounting” (Corsons 6). But consider his claim in these lines. He is capable of getting certain things into his poem, for example, “swerves of action” that mimic the “inlet’s cutting edge.” Indeed, dunes, like thoughts, do move, and this motion would determine some of the “organizations of grass” to be seen along the way, and all of this would be part of “the inlet’s cutting edge.” What I cannot find in the “saying” that is “Corsons Inlet” are the “white sandy paths of remembrance.” Other than telling us that he is going on this walk “again” in the first line and mentioning that “the moon was full last night,” I find no references to the past in the poem, no instances of a path, sandy or otherwise, to a remembered thing that is absent from the scene. Unless, of course, it is the remembered walk itself. (Consider another great romantic ode set on the seashore, Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” whose first sentence states, “I …/A reminiscence sing” [388].) “Corsons Inlet” is a reminiscence of the poem in Ammons’s mind as he walked as much as it is an account of a particular place. Of course, Ammons can claim whatever he wants about his “sayings,” which may include all of his work, but whether or not there is memory in “Corsons Inlet” is a significant point when we consider the number of readings of this poem of the “mirroring mind.” For example, Roger Gilbert’s claim that “Corsons Inlet” “seek[s] to integrate the phenomenal data of the walk with its accompanying stream of thought” (212), draws on the poem’s own language (the speaker finds meaning by following the “stream” of significance) but it also evokes the notion of William James’s “stream of consciousness,” which is a pretty good definition of the wandering mind. How can a wandering mind also be a mirroring mind? Nearly every critic who reads this poem praises its anti-transcendentalist impulses,11 and certainly Ammons rejects mind–body dualism, but “wandering mind” here can only be figurative. When one’s mind actually wanders, it does not need one’s legs. Aside from his abstract thoughts about avoiding form and his perceptive acts of attention to the environs, we do not see much of Ammons’s mind in the poem (or, if the discourse on form is annoying to a reader, she may feel that there’s too much mind in this poem). Ecocritical readers tend to see such transparency as an advantage, as if a state of pure, conscious perception can be attained and would be the ideal way of encountering an environment. But Ammons, when he sat down to type out his poem after the walk, decided to edit out any stray thoughts or wandering memories that might have occurred to him on his walk. Did he think about what he was going to have for lunch, remember the last time he walked there, or recall he had a bill to pay when he got home? If he did, we do not know. All we know is that he noted the weather, the state of the dunes, the plants and animals present, and thought about what it all might possibly mean. These omissions do not reduce the greatness of the poem, and I am not proposing to condemn Ammons for leaving out the cigarette butts or pop-tops that might have littered the dunes (as Marjorie Levinson pointed out the lack of beggars and pollution in “Tintern Abbey”). I am, however, arguing that a lot of mental activity has been suppressed here, and it is due to the ecopoetic form that Ammons has chosen for the poem. Gilbert is the only other critic I have found who notes the original title of “Corsons Inlet,” and he makes the good point that, although “A Nature Walk” “certainly lays greater emphasis on the formal coincidence of poem and walk[,] it also tips the balance too far in the direction of a universal ‘Nature,’ and away from the restrictions of the local. In naming the poem after the place in which it is set, Ammons implicitly announces his fidelity to the particulars of his walk, his refusal to synthesize them into some larger conception that would replace or dissolve them” (212). If this is the case, why did he drop the possessive apostrophe from the place name? Perhaps an oversight, but maybe a small way of indicating that the place and the poem are not identical. If he is walking there again, as he tells us, he has walked there before, and would have likely had ideas for poems, but there is only one poem called “Corsons Inlet.” There is still a fair level generalization in the title. The original title, then, exists as a trace in Ammons’s idea of a poem as a walk in that nature walks tend to have a loose structure but usually follow a path; walkers are encouraged to explore, but not to go too far off trail or to disturb anything; they are also encouraged to observe things in specific ways, to identify species, describe conditions, and so on.12 If everything is connected to everything else, nature walks are framing devices used to simplify interconnectedness—certain things are just screened out (the car that probably brought the poet to the shore, other people that might have been present, planes flying overhead, ships or boats offshore, etc.).13 They form hierarchical structures of perception—what is seen is more important than what is thought or remembered, what is natural or native is more important than what is artificial or exotic, noting human activity is less important than observing animal activity, and so on. The poem as walk is a good figure for ecopoetic form, it really does “walk the line” between form and formlessness for a while, but it also orders the content of a poem in a very deliberate way. The first seven lines of “Corsons Inlet,” in one sense then, are the totalization that the speaker tries to avoid. They encapsulate the form of the poem even before we have encountered its content: “I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning/to the sea, then turned right along/the surf/rounded a naked headland/and returned/along the inlet shore.” The nature walk is a containing form that sets boundaries and limits perception. What changes if a poem is like walking rather than a walk? I think Eigner’s poem will give us a sense of how ecopoetic form can engage with the interconnectedness of the mesh. “the music, the rooms” Because Eigner’s work is less familiar than Ammons’s, I will have to spend a bit more time describing and contextualizing—and quoting—“the music, the rooms,” a poem only about half as long as “Corsons Inlet,” but a fairly long one for Eigner. It was originally published as a limited edition (300 copies) broadside by The Desert Review Press in 1965, so it did not have the exposure of the poems published in Poetry magazine at the time of its first appearance. It was later included in Eigner’s Selected Poems (1971) and in George Quasha and Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology, America A Prophecy (1973), published by Random House.14 The poem displays its textuality not just in its typewriter spacing and variable margins, as we saw in “Corsons Inlet,” but also by concluding with a quotation, in this case Chief Pokagan’s description of the migration of the passenger pigeon. Eigner’s reading plays as large a role in this poem as his immediate, sensory perceptions, and in this case intertextuality functions as a primary form of interconnectedness. Eigner has also been reading Rachel Carson, but we will get to that in a moment. First, the opening of the poem:   the music,   the rooms silence silence silence silence sound        on the walls  the beach raveling   times advance    or back up      around earth     electric poles     the sun a reflected color       tropic       how distance is to some birds           in the wind        fishing          pinpoint         the circling air            food            the power       with desperate ease      food for me hits the water        without break, the cries       the meaning of change (2: 634)15 Let us try the same experiment with these twenty-one lines as we did with the first twenty-two of Ammons’s poem: the music, the rooms silence silence silence silence sound on the walls the beach raveling times advance or back up around earth electric poles the sun a reflected color tropic how distance is to some birds in the wind fishing pinpoint the circling air food the power with desperate ease food for me hits the water without break, the cries the meaning of change There is no understructure of grammar and syntax here as in “Corsons Inlet,” so the lines cannot be rearranged into Whitmanesque strophes. The phrasing and punctuation do not help a reader determine what is a subject or a predicate. And, unlike “Corsons Inlet,” the reader is not told where the action of the poem is occurring. Although Ammons’s speaker asserts that he has “erected no boundaries,/shutting out and shutting in, separating inside/from outside,” readers of his poem know for sure that he is outside because he told them he is going for a walk. In Eigner’s poem, we seem to be inside and outside at the same time—there is music, there are rooms and walls, but there is also the beach, birds, wind, and water. The poem really has “drawn no lines.” As for the “wavering” “eddies of perception”? Place the two excerpts in their original lineation side by side—which one has a “wavering” left margin? It has to be Eigner’s, and in this case, the left margin does not waiver because it is supposed to mimic the perception of a shoreline (though one is present in the poem), but because it was physically difficult for him to return the carriage all the way back to the left. It is a visual indicator of his embodiment; therefore, it is an integral part of the poem, not a mimetic one, made manifest by a machine. There are similarities between the two openings as well. The speaker in “the music, the rooms” is also liberated from “perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes” as the poem begins, and perhaps it is the music that frees him here rather than a physical departure. There are four walls of “silence” that sound seems to penetrate or occur upon. But whether the speaker has left his house and headed to the beach—Eigner’s house in Swampscott, Massachusetts, was separated from the ocean by a patch of woods, through which he could be taken to the beach in his wheelchair—readers are not told. There is also a lot of activity in Eigner’s poem, in this excerpt birds feeding primarily, which is a large part of the “news” in “Corsons Inlet” (7), and the question of meaning also arises. Rather than abstract theorizing at the onset, though, Eigner tries to see this activity from the birds’ point of view (“how distance is to some birds”), and perhaps the cycles of feeding, breeding, and migrating are “the meaning of change.” Then again, maybe not. The following lines read: information shifted,   player piano  on the screen,   the swimming moon   enters eclipse  out the window,  and other station  none of us is watching the cabinet         instrument forgotten   the clock shakes out  head bent from the wing      in a live broadcast    a case for various things     dry grassy fields      the blank sky     wampum gulls broke shells      such eyes       directed (2: 634–35) The meaning of change may be changing the channel (“information shifted”)—to a show with a player piano in it, evidently—so there still seems to be an inside here, but the outside is also present, lines about the birds feeding and diving are interpolated with the “live broadcast.” Their eyes, unlike the distracted viewers of the TV, are directed toward the particulars of the world to survive. The last set of lines before the quotation reads:  a malnutrition     Kenya   straightens hair it turns blond   scurvy is wiped out the dogs come, the group       on bikes  the street comes   the North Sea    studio on a ship     pivot spun       dark life      rises        leaving the island       the dim expanding miles     a steady white light       they might drive headlong into         the mist like a magnet      blows    lost bearings       nest in fisherman’s pocket           the wash (2: 635) The hunger of the birds feeding, also something that the speaker of “Corsons Inlet” describes at length, makes Eigner think of food shortages in Africa. Here is the “wandering” mind that we did not see in Ammons’s poem, and its meanderings reveal the mesh, the interconnected issues of food shortages, population growth, resource extraction, and consumption, as well as the media that makes one aware of these things. The closing quotation—a kind of inverted epigraph—extends this interconnectedness into the past and textuality. Immediately after “the wash,” Eigner types out this quote: “… distant thunder … Nearer and nearer came the strange commingling sound of sleigh bells, mixed with the rumbling of an approaching storm … I gazed in wonder and astonishment … They passed like a cloud through the branches of the high trees, through the underbrush and over the ground … They fluttered all about me; gently I caught two in my hands and carefully concealed them under my blanket.  I now began to realize they were mating …”    — Chief Pokagan, describing an onset of the now    extinct passenger pigeon, in Michigan, May 1850 (2: 635)16 Without the framing device of the nature walk, Eigner’s poem is radically open to all aspects of experience—perception, memory, reading, watching TV, listening to music, day dreaming, bodily sensation, observing birds, the sea shore, etc. We can get a sense of the manifold components of this poem from Eigner’s correspondence. A letter to his friend and fellow poet Cid Corman on April 19, 1965, provides the context for the composition of “the music, the rooms,” which is dated April 10–17, 1965: Getting into Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, though, some w[ee]ks ago—Disneyish in spots of course and hardly a gripping opus, scenes like habitat displays at the Museum—I’ve b[ee]n going to sleep off from it, practically, or into a big b[oo]k here Birds of America, in which maybe, at last, like they say, I have found my level, that is I’ve b[ee]n roaming around in and coming back to it rather comfortably for a few w[ee]ks (well, getting out of mind, now, sure enough, and the size irksome last few days, to my lap), the 106 color plates for instance I can connect with better than ever with fine art, for all sorts of sundry reasons, and reading ab[ou]t for instance nests with both young and eggs in [th]em, and the warmest blood in the world, and different powers of flight and migration distances and routes (aeronautics, physics, et al, satisfies a more spectacular, sensational kind of curiosity, anyway it brings hardness to the mind, hard subject, hard surfaces, hard drivin[g] narcissistic achievement, while the ultimate inaccessibility of animal life, where dog eats dog any old time, makes the irrelevancy of the anthromorphism [sic] stay more steadily in view, and allays its p[e]rplexing quality somewhat perhaps)17 So, one compositional difference between “the music, the rooms” and “Corsons Inlet” is the fact that Eigner spent about a week writing his poem, whereas Ammons went home and wrote his in one sitting. But, as Eigner indicates to Corman, his poem is a sort of walking nonetheless—he has been “roaming around in” Birds of America and Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, so his “mirroring mind” is wandering, and it reflects not just perceptions of his surroundings but also his reading, curiosity, and remembering. Dogs and bikes come down his street and blend with what he is seeing on TV and learning about the ocean from Carson, there are no lines, no boundaries drawn. There is no distinction between inside and outside in “the music, the rooms.” Both Eigner and Ammons express the desire for humility in recording their rambles, not to impose their own meanings on the objects that appear in their poems. In his letter to Corman, Eigner admits that writing a longer poem is an example of “hard drivin[g] narcissistic achievement” even as he wants to critique the human-centeredness of such achievement. Under the Sea Wind and Birds of America give him some understanding of the natural processes and cycles of the poem’s environmental content, but they also give him the sense of “the ultimate inaccessibility of animal life.” In a poem that is concerned with sound as much as sight, Eigner might be thinking of passages from Carson’s book such as: The mackerel are voiceless and they make no sound… . As the mackerel hurry shoreward they swim in tier above tier. Throughout those weeks when the fish are rolling in from the open sea the scattered shoals between the edge of the continent and the shore are often darkened as the earth was once dimmed by the passing of another living cloud—the flights of passenger pigeons. (Under 111) By juxtaposing the quotation from Birds of America (Chief Pokagan’s description is included in the entry on the passenger pigeon in volume two [Pearson 2: 45]) with the “dark life … leaving the island” and the “wash” of the sea, Eigner imagines how one “living cloud” in the ocean mirrors another “living cloud” that once filled the air. (Another poem that uses material from Birds in America written just before “the music, the rooms” begins “the water is the sky” [2: 633].) What is more, the quote from Chief Pokagan highlights the sound of the passenger pigeons, and this seems to be another reason Eigner tacks the quote to the end of a poem that has not mentioned passenger pigeons. By repeating the word “silence” four times in a row at the beginning, and concluding with a description of an animal sound that will never again be heard, “the music, the rooms” embodies the meaning of the title of Carson’s Silent Spring.18 Attempting to get as much into his poem as he can, and to find the interrelations among these things, Eigner types the textual and extratextual weave of things as they appear in the mesh. The significance of the slight difference between positing a poem as a walk and saying that a poem is like walking should now be clear. Although the speaker in “Corsons Inlet” asserts that “I have perceived nothing completely,” and the poem concludes, “tomorrow a new walk is a new walk” (8), there is closure nonetheless. In his essay “A Poem Is a Walk,” Ammons writes that one of the similarities between poems and walks is that “each turns, one or more times, and eventually returns” (17). Even if they are linear—composed in lines or following a straight path out and back—they are also circular and achieve a containing limit or boundary once they are done. For a walk to be a walk, it must have a beginning, middle, and end; otherwise, it is just walking. For Ammons, walks are repeatable but not reproducible (“every walk is unreproducible as is every poem”). Eigner uses the weaker trope—a simile does not assert identity just similarity—and his verbal noun captures the ongoingness of process rather than its mere repetition. The walk, however, is not Ammons’s only analogy for ecopoetic form. Cushman observes, “[w]inds, waves, brooks, waterfalls, snowfalls, mountains, dunes, elm trees—again and again these natural forms suggest texts to be read in poems attempting to become their figurative analogues” (154). To this list a reader of Ammons’s work in the 1960s could add spider webs (“Identity,” from Expressions of Sea Level), nests (“Configurations”) and maggots (“Catalyst,” both from Corsons Inlet), as well as DNA (“Essay on Poetics”). The multiplicity and variety of these figures allow Ammons to avoid being pinned down to a single trope, thereby escaping the residual trace of the nature walk as a containing form. The strength of the metaphor—a poem is a walk—is in fact its weakness as a figure for ecopoetic form. Walking, after the “toddler” stage, comes naturally to most human beings, but a nature walk is a cultural construct. Ammons interrogates the traditional analogies for organic form in “Essay on Poetics”: “in poems, the insubstantial processes of becoming/form inscrutable parts of the living thing: and then how the//orders of the poem build up and cooperate into the pure heat of/sight and insight, trembling and terror … organisms, I can tell you, build up under the thrust to//joy and nothing else can lift them out of the miry circumstance:/and poems are pure joy” (443). The speaker then turns to the “vegetative analogy” that is the hallmark of romantic metaphors for the organic form of a poem: [A poem is] extremely valuable: also, in its changing, it pictures how organizations can change, incorporate innovation, deal with accidenceand surprise, and maintain their purpose—increasing the means and assuring the probability of survival: the point of change, though, brings me to a consideration of the adequacy of the transcendental vegetative analogy: the analogy is so appealing, so swept with conviction, that I hardly ever have the strength to question it: I’ve often said that a poem in becoming generates the laws of its own becoming: that certainly sounds like a tree, growing up with no purpose but to become itself (regardless of the fact that many are constantly trying to turn it into lumber): but actually, a tree is a print-out: the tree becomes exactly what the locked genetic code has preordained—allowing, of course, for variables of weather, soil, etc.: so that the idea that some organic becoming is realizing itself in the vegetative kingdom is only partially adequate: real change occurs along chromosomes, a risky business apparently based on accidence, chance, unforeseeable distortion (446) “Essay on Poetics” is the culmination of Ammons’s ecopoetic form in the 1960 s because it questions the standard analogy of poem as organism and is not structured as a nature walk. It is a verse essay because it is an assay into the nature of the lyric (that is how it starts out, at least), and in this sense it rambles more widely and variously than “Corsons Inlet.” Although considerably longer than Eigner’s “the music, the rooms,” the scene of composition has more in common with that poem than “Corsons Inlet.” “Essay on Poetics” was written over a three-day period in which Ammons and his family were housebound by a snowstorm. There is a wandering mind in the poem, and the form wanders as well, but in a very different manner than “Corsons Inlet.” Ammons’s tercets represent the arbitrariness of a code—they are “sight” stanzas, produced by typography rather than meter or rhyme scheme—but they are also interrupted by short, highly enjambed lyrics, long verse paragraphs, and quotations along the way. These interruptions manifest the “risky business” of “accidence, chance, unforeseen distortion” within “the locked genetic code.” Here, ecopoetic form engages both boundedness and liberation, acts of perception and acts of cognition, the intertextual and the extratextual, and to do so it turns the organism into a machine, or at least a machine-made “print-out.” Such blending is the essential move that distinguishes ecopoetic form from traditional organic form. One last detail confirms my sense that Ammons’s textualist ecopoetics is closer to Eigner’s than it appears from “Corsons Inlet.” It would be surprising if there was a direct connection between “the music, the rooms” and “Essay on Poetics,” but it is intriguing that the quotations appear at the end of Ammons’s long poem much like Eigner’s citation from Birds of America. Ammons’s citation serves the same purpose as Eigner’s: to ground the poem in textuality, at the same time it is engaged in acts of perception, and to make meaning. One of Ammons’s quotations is from an article called “The Life of an Estuary” from a 1954 issue of Scientific American (Eigner was also a reader of that magazine). The excerpt is clearly related to “Corsons Inlet” in that it describes the “rich” but “also almost inconceivably dangerous” tidal environment, and the speaker comments, “isn’t that beautiful: it has bearing in many/ways on my argument: it provided me years ago with ideas on/risks and possibilities” (448). One verse paragraph in “Corsons Inlet” begins, “risk is full: every living thing in/siege” (7). In this way, “Essay on Poetics” provides a textualized moment of memory that informs the earlier poem but was screened out by the form of the nature walk. The Machine in the Organism Let us return to Poetry magazine in the 1960 s for one more look at the mutation of organic form into ecopoetic form. One of the most famous articulations of organic form in postmodern poetry is Denise Levertov’s “Some Notes on Organic Form,” which followed Ammons’s “A Note on Prosody” two years later in Poetry’s September 1965 issue. Her “partial definition” of “organic poetry” reads: “it is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories” (420). She does not select a single analogy to stand for her sense of this form, a tree or waterfall or web or genetic code, but she does associate the word organic with living things, so organism is behind her usage (423). But, most important for Levertov, organic form is the true form of perception because “back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and reveal” (420). The tension between discovery and invention is completely elided here, and, for Levertov, producing an organic-form poem means discovery and revelation, not invention and materialization. Compare the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics’s definition of “organism” from its first edition, also published in 1965: Critics as diverse as Aristotle, Longinus, Emerson, Henry James, Croce, Dewey, and Brooks have analogized artistic works to living things. However, the analogy has been most fully exploited by the German romantic critics and Coleridge, who were trying to formulate a “nonmechanistic” aesthetics and psychology for the creative process … the result [of which] is an artistic work which in essence is like a living thing in that multiplicity and unity, the particular and the universal, content and form have coalesced and fused. (Preminger 593–94) Of course, Levertov is approaching organic form from the craftsperson’s perspective and the encyclopedia is describing the term’s use by critics, but they are defining it in the same way. Levertov writes, “content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction” and their fusion “is discoverable only in the work, not before it” (422).19 The encyclopedia entry, since it is concerned with organism as a critical concept, explains that the New Criticism (“contemporary criticism” in its phrasing) has abandoned the metaphorical or analogical associations with living organisms and instead uses the term for its key value of unity: “if the whole lacks no part necessary for its completeness, then the parts are ‘organically related’ and the whole has ‘organic unity’” (Preminger 594). So, the return to organic analogies that we see in Levertov and Ammons is a type of neoromanticism, a harkening back to the organic form of Keats, Coleridge, Whitman, and Emerson. For two poets who were deeply influenced by William Carlos Williams, this might give us pause. Williams himself tried out various analogies to express his ideas about poetic form, but his most famous one is decidedly not “organic” in this sense: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. (Collected Poems 2: 54) Yet, it is “organic” in the terms of the New Critics—as long as all the parts are necessary and add up to a whole, it does not matter if it is an organism or a machine. And Williams might have a particular machine in mind for his analogy. Here is how he describes writing in between patients at his office: I had my typewriter in my office desk. All I needed to do was to pull up the leaf to which it was fastened and I was ready to go… . If a patient came in at the door while I was in the middle of a sentence, bang would go the machine… . When the patient left, up would come the machine. (Autobiography xiii–xiv) As a good modernist, Williams was bound to celebrate the machine, but the idiomatic phrasing of “machine” for a typewriter brings the analogy into the realm of mechanical reproducibility (to borrow Benjamin’s phrase).20 As we saw earlier, ecopoetic form for both Ammons and Eigner is intimately related to composing poems on manual typewriters. How do we reconcile the tension between organism and machine (without invoking Harraway’s cyborg)? Ecotheory may help. In “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Morton writes, Life forms consist of all sorts of structures that are not very organic… . Humans keep trying to distinguish rigorously between the living and machinic… . Darwinism and genomics … show that not only is the distinction untenable, but life as such is a machinic, algorithmic functioning, and that what we call “life” and “consciousness” are emergent effects of more fundamental machine-like processes. (7) Embracing the “machinic” does not mean giving up the organic, and embracing the organism means accepting the machine. The fear of the living machine, the human robot, then, is not based in a value system aligned with nature that privileges the organic over the mechanical; rather, it is a form of ecophobia.21 In this light, we can see early criticisms of projective verse’s utilization of the typewriter, which at first seem to be organicist rejections of the machine, as ecophobic reactions against “the irruption of the mechanism in the word,” as Heidegger described typewriting (qtd. in Kittler 199).22 And these reactions were first registered in Poetry magazine. In his review of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry, X. J. Kennedy mocked Olson’s proposal for the typewriter as a method of scoring a poem: “Who would have thought his Corona portable an instrument of such sensitivity?” (244). And, Galway Kinnell, reviewing Eigner’s On My Eyes, wrote, The real value of getting rid of rhyme and meter, I had supposed, was in order to throw the responsibility for the poem wholly on speech itself. Here this is not done. The laying out of a kind of score by typewriter-spacing only supplants those old devices with a newer one, which is, this time, not even integral with the words. (402)23 Eigner and Ammons demonstrate that “typewriter-spacing” is indeed “integral with the words” by making the visual appearance of the poem on the page central to their ecopoetic form. The shape and spacing create the movement of the text on the page and the interconnectedness of text and context produce something like life. The “machine-like process” of graphing standardized letter-forms onto paper makes ecology a text and text ecological. In the decade of Silent Spring, A. R. Ammons and Larry Eigner invented ecopoetic form by typing the mesh. Footnotes 1 " Harold Bloom’s esteem for Ammons is well known, and the journal Diacritics published a special issue on his work in 1973, an indicator of his canonical status only part way through his career. Ammons is often discussed in ecocritical assessments of poetry such as Scigaj, Elder, and Bryson, and the Modern American Poetry website includes at least half a dozen readings of “Corsons Inlet” in its criticism section. 2 " For example, two out of the three poems included in The Ecopoetry Anthology (Fisher-Wirth and Street)—“Corsons Inlet” and “Gravelly Run”—are from this period (the third is an excerpt from his long, later poem Garbage). Eigner is also included in this anthology. 3 " This flowering of ecopoetics in Poetry occurred under Henry Rago’s editorship (1955–69), who took Harriet Monroe’s “open door” policy of submission further than any other editor. The Hudson Review is also a periodical seed bed for early ecopoetics. It published a special issue on “Poetry and Ecology” in fall 1970, which included seminal ecopoetic work such as Ammon’s “Essay on Poetics” and Berry’s “A Secular Pilgrimage,” as well as poems by Merwin and Snyder. 4 " William Carlos Williams’s use of typewriter spacing influences both Ammons and Eigner, and Olson’s theory of projective verse, which also emphasizes the poet’s control over space on the page through the machine’s typography, was also an influence on Eigner. 5 " A textualist poetics such as this extends, at least, as far back as Whitman, who was trained in typesetting and printed Leaves of Grass himself. See Folsom for Whitman’s book-making process and its effects on his poetics. 6 " Jeffrey C. Robinson examines “the walk” as a convention of Romantic poetry, and Roger Gilbert, in Walks in the World, discusses the mimetic connection between walks and poems in twentieth-century American poetry. The association of poetry and walking has a long history; because the scope of this essay is limited to Eigner and Ammons, I do not have room here to discuss other peripatetic poetics. For an overview of poetic walking that covers many English, French, and American poets, see Hirsch, and for a disability perspective see Ferris. A more detailed discussion of Eigner in this context can be found in Hart. 7 " Cushman points out that “[t]he shifting of ‘emphasis’ toward the left margin corresponds to enjambment, although Ammons does not use that term” in the “Note on Prosody” (162). 8 " Brenda Hillman proposes a tripartite notion of place for ecopoetics that includes textuality: bioregion, the actual location of the poet; “the world of spirits, myth, and dream”; and “the site of the material syllable, the composition” (Hume 764). My thanks to one of ISLE’s anonymous reviewers for pointing out Hillman’s comments in this interview. 9 " Both Scigaj and Knickerbocker try to resolve the issue of language and reference by the notion of foregrounding, so the requirement of nontransparent language distinguishes this ecopoetics from theirs. Knickerbocker asserts that “ecopoetics [is] the foregrounding of poetic artifice as a manifestation of our interrelation with the rest of nature” (159), and Scigaj puts it this way: Within ecopoetry and environmental poetry, language is often foregrounded only to reveal its limitations, and this is accomplished in a such a way that the reader’s gaze is thrust beyond language back into the less limited natural world that language refers to, the inhabited place where humans must live in harmony with ecological cycles. (37) " There is a dilemma here: is language natural or artificial, does it connect us to or separate us from nature, does it have an ontological status? All good questions. Yet, a more important question for both Scigaj and Knickerbocker is how does “foregrounding” indicate the limits of language? Neither critic seems to use this term in its technical sense formulated by structuralist linguistics. According to Jan Mukařovský, foregrounding (Victor Shlovsky’s “defamiliarization” is an equivalent term) is the essence of poetic language: “the possibility of distorting the norm of the standard … is indispensible to poetry. Without it, there would be no poetry” (46). And he adds, “By the very fact of foregrounding, poetry increases and refines the ability to handle language in general; it gives the language the ability to adjust more flexibly to new requirements and it gives it a richer differentiation of its means of expression” (52). Neither Scigaj nor Knickerbocker account for this idea of foregrounding, which, rather than demonstrating the limits of language is one of its great strengths and advantages (at least in poetry). The distinction between gazing and reading should also be insisted upon in Scigaj’s case. One does not gaze at language in the process of reading—once there is a gaze there is no reader. 10 " Along with line breaks, the modification or elimination of punctuation is one of the primary markers of ecopoetic form as it emerges in the 1960s. Merwin, for example, explains that as he became more aware of environmental crisis and more involved in antiwar activism, his use of punctuation changed. He writes, By the end of the poems in The Moving Target I had relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions, a move that evolved from my growing sense that punctuation alluded to and assumed an allegiance to the rational protocol of written language, and of prose in particular. I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page. Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in. (1) 11 " Cushman, for example: “The declaration of mental independence in ‘Corsons Inlet’ … is deceptive. It does not mean that the speaker now enjoys an Emersonian transparency, as he becomes one with formless Unity” (156). 12 " For a parody of such nature walk activities, see Chast. 13 " Schuster uses the idea of the quadrat to suggest the usefulness of such framing devices for studying interconnectedness (vii). 14 " The Desert Review Press edition is the best way to get a sense of the poem’s shape on the page, though it does not reproduce the poem in the courier font of Eigner’s typewriter (as does The Collected Poetry of Larry Eigner). It can be viewed at Brown University’s Digital Repository (https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:272367/). 15 " The practice in citing Eigner’s work is to reproduce excerpts in the equivalent spacing courier font to replicate the margins and spacing of his typescripts. I follow this convention in the block indented quotations, but in-text citations are in standard font. 16 " I have reproduced the way Eigner types this passage but have not used the courier font since it is prose. 17 " Cid Corman papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. 18 " Eigner puns on Carson’s title a number of times in his work; for example, a brief poem, dated July 17, 1963, begins, “in the silence of Spring / and all” (2: 531), a double allusion to Silent Spring and Williams’s Spring and All. 19 " For an ecocritical account of Levertov’s organic form, see Knickerbocker (175, 191, n. 3). 20 " The other modernist precursor for projectivism’s typewriter fetish is e. e. cummings. In “Projective Verse,” Olson, also using the term machine for the typewriter, proclaims, “It is time we picked the fruits of the experiments of Cummings, Pound, Williams, each of whom, after his way, already used the machine as a scoring to his composing, as a script to his vocalization” (Collected Prose 245). And, recalling some of his first experiences with modern poetry in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Eigner writes, “My brother went to Dartmouth and when he came home on his first Xmas vacation brought cummings’ Collected Poems… . I looked at cummings seriously or singly enough to see for one thing punctuation can be actually part of a piece” (Areas 133). 21 " Cummings himself considered the typewriter an “organic” mode of composition as opposed to the linotype machine, which “cast” an entire line in type with “justified” spacing as opposed to letter by letter with equivalent spacing. Writing to his Aunt Jane in 1935, cummings explains that “the linotype (being a gadget) inflicts a preestablished whole—the type ‘line’—on every smallest part;so that words, letters, punctuation marks &(most important of all)spaces-between-these various elements, awake to find themselves rearranged automatically” (141; idiosyncratic spacing in original). For cummings, the typewriter was the weapon of “the army of the Organic marching against [the] Mechanism” of standardization. My thanks to one of ISLE’s anonymous reviewers for bringing cummings’s letter to my attention. 22 " Because Eigner’s disability made typing a necessity (his handwriting is barely legible), it is interesting to note the connection between disability and the development of typewriters. 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TI - Walking the Walk: Ammons, Eigner, and Ecopoetic Form in the 1960s
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy001
DA - 2017-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/walking-the-walk-ammons-eigner-and-ecopoetic-form-in-the-1960s-bN6BWnBieQ
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