Poet Charles Olson, last Rector of Black Mountain College Robinson Jeffers had some notoriety in the 1920s and 30s, but his star declined after World War II. As other, younger poets rose to prominence, he was largely ignored by readers to the east, north, and south of Carmel. He did not become embittered: he already was (we don’t know what the hawks thought about it). Likewise, in the Dark Mountain manifesto, there is more than a whiff of sour grapes towards those “literary lions” writing “from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation . . . .” The manifestors dismiss “mainstream art in the west” as being “about shock; about busting taboos, about Getting Noticed,” resulting in our “ironic, exhausted, post-everything times . . . .”* So it’s not surprising that they would embrace writers who, in 2009, looked thoroughly conventional – even retro – on this side of the Atlantic. The Dark Mountaineers’ version of literature, like the Romantics, is mimetic: it is about representing the more-than-human world as a subject apart from it. And ultimately, it’s about conveying ideas. And it’s hard to think of anything more conventionally human or civilized than that. And in art, quite conservative.
They apparently do not, as that passé shocker William Carlos Williams once put it, regard the poem as “an addition to nature” (emphasis added). They do not cite (and may not know) the work being done, also in North America, by poets and critics working in the field of “ecopoetics,” who are trying to think of writing itself as a material phenomenon. The spider web is not a metaphor for them, it is a work; the decoration of the bowerbird’s bower, like the poem, a physical artifact produced by an organism (often for the same goal). Writing happens using graphite, calcium carbonate, or various natural or petrochemical inks on a receptive physical medium. Ecopoetics rejects the post-Romantic notion of the poem as disembodied conduit for the transmission of emotions. Rather than looking to Jeffers’ “dark mountain” for inspiration, they look to Black Mountain – that is, the loosely-identified group of poets who taught at that experimental school in North Carolina in the 1950s or were influenced by those who did. Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, Larry Eigner: all of these writers felt and foregrounded the material reality of writing as marks on a piece of paper combined with the white space of the page; or as breath expelled from the lungs and shaped by the vocal chords – a material reality that could grow according to its own internal workings, as much or more than by ideas. Poetry may or may not be about “nature,” but it is always part of the ecosystem, a specimen. Black Mountain poets were acutely aware of the edges of poetic lines, the meaning of white space (and geographical space), the movement of the eye, the length of the breath, the physical appearance of the poem as visual composition. In other words, a key tendency in Black Mountain poetics is the notion of writing as material and language as physical – biological activities that are coterminous with the more-than-human world, rather than simply referring to it.** The last section of “Uncivilisation” is subtitled “To the Foothills!” and opens with an epigraph by (wait for it) . . . William Wordsworth: “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can” (from “The Tables Turned”). Poetry and nature as teaching about morality and human nature: this attitude does not bode well as a way to unhumanize our views, even a little. The Uncivilizers have no patience with the political organizers toiling in the cities: “politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within.” So, they really do mean to go “out into the wilderness” to “gain perspective.” Indeed, it may be easier to move away from humanism by moving away from humans – or to be a curmudgeon living in a writers’ colony near hiking trails, like Jeffers. The big difference: Big Sur didn’t burn as often, back then. Jeffers didn’t have to worry about climate chaos impinging on his splendid isolation. ____________________________________________________________________________________ * Jeffers, it should be noted, shocked readers initially by the racy content and unconventional form of his earlier work – and his later work is dripping with W-50-weight irony. ** Eigner not least, given his cerebral palsy and difficulty typing and speaking. He was very aware of his page as an extension of his actual window.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |