“All our literatures are leavings,” writes Gary Snyder (Practice of the Wild, 112), recycling Thoreau’s remark “Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils,” which he wrote in his journal after observing that “while we are clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature’s primitive wildernesses” (16 March 1852). While Thoreau’s reading in the classics marked him as a Harvard man for his contemporaries, his instincts were not scholastic, but ecological. Walden, that prospectus of wild moods, is a compost of rhetorical jubilation Thoreau prepared with geophysical patience. The years he spent writing Walden are testimony to a composting sensibility : attuned to the rhythms by which literary models decayed and enriched the soil, Thoreau was prepared for his own notebook entries (the ready mulch of chronicle) to fertilize and incubate the book that was latent in them. Fittingly, Thoreau’s resources included Walter Whiter’s Etymologicon Universale (1822), its two fat tomes proclaiming with manic industry that all words derive from references to earth, or with reference to the activity of handling it. Thoreau’s palpable delight in the Homeric battle of the ants is not just pleasure in the rhetorical inversion, but reverence for microcosms rendered visible in the scale of human prejudice, revisiting old paradigms of what Melville called our mortal inter-indebtedness; “indeed what reason may not goe to Schoole to the wisedome of Bees, Ants, and Spiders?” Thomas Browne wonders (Religio Medici, para. 15). “Thus there are two bookes from whence I collect my Divinity,” he declares : “besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the eyes of all : those that never saw him in the one, have discovered him in the other : This was the Scripture and Theology of the Heathens … [who] knew better how to joyne and reade these mysticall letters, than wee Christians, who cast a more carelesse eye on these common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature” (para. 16). Thoreau shared a comparable reverence for the pagan hieroglyphic divinity of the natural world.
A nineteenth-century agricultural milieu and a sixteenth-century theological recapitulation of the great chain of being are not the only settings in which thoughts of compost might arise. Eugene Jolas, the polyglot metropolitan editor of the avant-garde journal transition (in which Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was serialized), advocated on behalf of a rectified “vertigral” imagination, “subobjective” and “inter-racial,” with a corollary in poetics : “The ‘poem’ must change into a mantic compost which organizes the expanding consciousness of’the expanding universe’” (“Workshop,” 100). For Jolas, compost is not conceptually restricted to the decay of organic matter; it affords a commanding prospect of correspondences, resonant parallelisms, glimpses of independent figures participating in a fortuitous isomorphism.*
“A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sheashell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers,” wrote Emerson in “The Poet.” Whitman promptly echoed the injunction in his preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass: “The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses”—shedding, along the way, Emerson’s attachment to rhyme as an identifying trait of poetry. Whitman then goes on to offer a prescriptive manual of applications for his book:
This is what you shall do : Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
Carefully placed in the deepest recess of this compendium is Whitman’s insistence that his poems be read outdoors. When, in “The Lesson of a Tree”—one of the entries in Specimen Days—he recommends arboreal articulation as antidote to human chatter, the botanical affiliation of his “leaves” is evident.
The composting sensibility awakened by the outdoor setting is an adamant feature of Whitman’s sense of education. In the late (1888) “Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” Whitman reminisces on his “outdoor influences”—citing, in this category, the works of Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, the Nibelungenlied, and “the ancient Hindoo poems”: “it makes such difference where you read,” he notes. “I have wonder’d since why I was not overwhelm’d by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them … in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading landscape and vistas, or the sea rolling in.” Whitman of course makes a rhetorical point that equates the grand masters with the great outdoors, and he offers a tacit invitation to read Leaves of Grass before a panoramic scene by Frederic Church or Albert Biertstadt, American painters of the geophysical sublime. But Whitman admits a more endearingly domestic sort of outdoors episode as well in a memorable icon of the writer at work in Specimen Days, in which “a drove of young hogs rooting in soft ground near the oak under which I sit … come sniffing near me, and then scamper away, with grunts”—a scene further elaborated by “the clear notes of the quail” and “the quiver of leaf-shadows over the paper as I write”; “the swift darting of many sand-swallows coming and going” and “the odor of the cedar and oak, so palpable, as evening approaches.” There is an easy and equitable transition here in which the parenthetical definition of Nature as “the only complete, actual poem” in Democratic Vistas is not an instance of literary Romanticism, but a pledge of allegiance to what Gregory Bateson called the ecology of mind. “The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body,” writes Bateson in a passage verging on the “cosmic consciousness” announced by Whitman’s Ontario devotee Dr. Bucke. “It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 467). Karl Kroeber gives a precise corollary in his celebration of the English Romantic poets’ anticipation of modern ecology. “The unity of an ecosystem … is not something sensorily perceptible, even though it is determinative of our sensory experience,” he observes. “An ecosystem, finally, although very complicated, is also something very specific. So it is understandable that the romantics emphasized the importance of complex integral unities of being whose wholeness could only be imagined” (Ecological Literary Criticism, 58). “Wholeness” is an overdetermined word, so it might be better to speak of long-range views or the bigger picture. Succinctly put by Wendell Berry, “We live in eternity while we live in time. It is only by imagination that we know this” (Standing by Words, 90).
Calling on the imagination as a resource of ecological understanding means calling on poetry in a truly re-creational capacity, one that redefines “recreation” as original participation, much as Coleridge sought a poetry that would propagate a continuum initiated by the divine fiat. Such a prospect has gone in and out of focus during the past two centuries, but its reemergence under the countenance of a so-called “Black Mountain” school was historically congruent with, and sometimes affiliated with, the interdisciplinary matrix gathered around what Norbert Wiener named “cybernetics.” Systems theory is a more general term for it, and recently the focus has been on self-organization as a property observable in systems at different thresholds of organic integrity and sapience. Henri Atlan defines a field of interanimating tendencies converging on “the possibility of the emergence of newness, of the unpredicted”—which is the aspiration of the poetics informing This Compost. “It is at this junction, which makes time creative, that we see appear, as a shadow, what we could call a self-unconsciousness, not necessarily human. And we can reach this junction by three different paths : one which explores the organizational role of randomness; another which explores the role of the creation of meaning; and a third, that of the autonomy of the self, which brings together ‘the knower, the known, and knowledge’” (Atlan 127). These paths can be followed in reflecting on poetry as well. Randomness, for instance, was first solicited as an object of poetic aspiration by Stéphane Mallarmé, whose Un coup de dés was the inaugural text of open form (preceded, however, by the serial practices of Whitman and Dickinson). Atlan’s second path, the creation of meaning, is relevant to poetry in obvious ways, but it’s important to construe it in the extrasemantic sense that poetry re-creates language. It is not confined to the role of performative arabesque, dilation on a space previously (or even evidently) convened. In this capacity it is informed by the principle of structural coupling outlined by the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela : “We work out our lives in mutual linguistic coupling, not because language permits us to reveal ourselves but because we are constituted in language in a continuous becoming that we bring forth with others” (Tree of Knowledge, 235). Atlan’s third path, which envisions a conjunction of subject-object-act as constitutive of an autonomous self, is more expressively subsumed under the principle of autopoeisis, in which “values are not objects but moiré patterns which emerge from the superimposition of opposites” (William Irwin Thompson, Gaia, 28).* The self that becomes evident in the occasion of autopoeisis is not the preestablished “speaker”—the enunciative rational ego—which we have been accustomed to identify in the poem. It’s not easy, of course, to peremptorily cancel or refuse the accumulated authority of poetry’s resident voice-over. The struggle to do so continues to precipitate squalls and squalor in which a hideous proprietary vocabulary anatomizes “modernist” from “postmodernist” tendencies. But in the milieu of This Compost these terminological considerations are beside the point. This is not to deny their validity under certain conditions, in some discussions, but to insist on the nondenominational value, as it were, of what Aldo Leopold affirmed as a need “to preserve the element of Unknown Places” (The River, 125). He was referring to wilderness, but (and in fact because of that) poetry necessarily belongs to such places.*
In his late essay, “Poetry To-day in America—Shakspere—The Future” (1881), Walt Whitman reiterated a charge he had been making for a quarter century, that “the overwhelming mass of poetic works, as now absorb’d into human character, exerts a certain constipating, repressing, in-door, and artificial influence.” The derogatory characterization of the “in-door” here need not be taken literally : the “Omen in the Bone” (no. 532) and the “Contusion of the Husk” (no. 1135) of which the domestic Emily Dickinson writes are admonitions to regard any settled stance as another constipated hindrance to the adventure of enlargement, along with the lubrications of what Whitman called “adhesiveness.” Between them, Dickinson and Whitman typify literal versions of indoor and outdoor life; but at the same time, the poetic wilderness they share reveals the ineptitude of the literal. They embody a profound compulsion to find the measure of poetry in “orbic traits” (Whitman)—“For Earths, grow thick as / Berries, in my native town,” Dickinson writes. “My Basket holds — just — Firmaments — / Those — dangle easy — on my arm, / But smaller bundles — Cram” (no. 352). Whitman’s prospect in “Democratic Vistas” seems germane to Dickinson as well : arguing the need for “a new Literature, perhaps a new Metaphysics, certainly a new Poetry,” he clarifies that he does not mean “the smooth walks, trimmed hedges, posys and nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its geological history, the cosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls through the illimitable areas, light as a feather, though weighing billions of tons.”
If we take this orbic mass as the geophysical phantom of an ever-impending “new Poetry,” where are we to find it today? A glance at the bulk of modern poetry suggests a calamitous abandonment of the legacy imposed—enabled—by Whitman and Dickinson. The situation is hardly recent, of course. Even the major impetus of high modernism advanced without reference to Whitman and Dickinson (except for Pound’s testy acknowledgement of his male forebear, and William Carlos Williams’s willingness to stake out a claim for “antipoetry” in Spring and All as affording a “co-extention with the universe” [Collected Poems, 1:177, 192]). The self-proclaimed “post-modernism” of Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur—sanctioned for American poetry by Auden’s move to New York in 1940—revitalized the “smooth walks” and “trimmed hedges.” Lowell was a dissimulator, of course, since even as he embodied the urbane persona of metrical order he clawed his way up the heap of reputations with the rapaciousness of a raccoon. But his debonair persona lent credibility to hosts of lesser epigones, and to read through much of the verse of the 1950s is to think (as Whitman did ninety years earlier) that “To prune, gather, trim, conform, and ever cram and stuff, and be genteel and proper, is the pressure of our days.”
This Compost searches out another order of poetry, one which literary politics has made it misleading to call “open,” so I prefer to indicate its temper by way of George Santayana, who complained that European philosophical systems “are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the center and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert” (“Genteel Tradition,” 106). The corollary, of course, is that mountains and woods—Mountains and Rivers Without End (Snyder)—actually compel certain assertions concerning “a defense of cosmos, not scenery” (Oelschlaeger, “Wilderness, Civilization, and Language,” 273). By the same measure it is poetry, not poets—the system, not the signet—that is in need of attention and nurture.*
“Ecology is the science of communities, and the ecological conscience is therefore the ethics of community life,” wrote Aldo Leopold in 1947 (The River, 340). I would describe poetry as ecology in the community of words. Curt Meine has noted Leopold’s turn, late in his life (when he was writing Sand County Almanac), to the prospect that “perception now had survival value; aesthetic sensitivity, as partially redefined by the new science [ecology], was useful” (“Utility of Preservation,” 150).* In 1978 Neil Evernden urged that “Environmentalism without aesthetics is merely regional planning” (“Beyond Ecology,” 103). In the same year, William Rueckert (notably a follower of Kenneth Burke) proposed a model of the poem as “stored energy, a formal turbulence.” “Poems are part of the energy pathways which sustain life,” he wrote. “Poems are a verbal equivalent of fossil fuel (stored energy), but they are a renewable source of energy” (“Literature and Ecology,” 108). It’s an optimistic assumption. While I do not give much credence to familiar models of artistic decadence and decline, I do think of poems as ecosystems, precariously adjusted to the surrounding biomass, and concur with Gary Snyder’s view of poetry (articulated as early as 1967) as “ecological survival technique” (Earth House Hold, 117). The nutritive sensibility, envisioned as an environmental continuum encompassing biotic as well as cultural communities, has recently prompted Snyder to speak of languages as “naturally evolved wild systems”: “language does not impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back” (Place in Space, 174)—a lovely thought that brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s image of “a Panther in the Glove” (no. 244). The image is a stark reminder of hidden claws, the core of menace informing even while potentially undermining our personae. It is these “less familiar energies of the wild world, and their analogs in the imagination, [which] have given us ecologies of the mind,” writes Snyder (Practice of the Wild, III). He also notes that “in spite of years of personhood, we remain unpredictable even to our own selves”—and this unpredictability is the mark of our wildness, “‘wild’ [being] a name for the way that phenomena continually actualize themselves” (Place in Space, 173, 168).
Poetry is a kind of echo-location.* But since its medium is language, its repertoire of echoes is bewilderingly diverse. The greediest of gifts, the most beneficent of appropriations, poetry is language disclosed as paradox, where naming does not re-present but dissolves and then reforms creation, where the speaker too is dissolved into the act of speech and reemerges, alieniloquiam, as another, a reader or listener who is in turn displaced from self-assurance, forced to take up residence in the strange. Poetry is this strangely familiar realm of estrangements, its uncanniness preternaturally arousing a maximum alertness, but an alertness achieved paradoxically, by dissolving the resources of intellection and identity. I don’t mean to be mystifying; the point is to abide by that “practice of the wild” evoked by Snyder. Such practice is invariably and necessarily collective, and that is what this book is about. This Compost goes about its business by pragmatically realizing its issues in its design. It is written in units of variable length, but tending to brevity, the sequence of which is determined by imaginal,† not logical considerations; its argument is hologrammatic, not hypotactic—that is, not hierarchically disposed, but radically egalitarian. Its parts are its wholes and vice versa. If holes are found in the “argument,” all the better—they’re for burrowing, for warmth and intimacy.
This Compost takes seriously the prospect of an “opening of the field,” which was worked out in the quasi-collaborative enthusiasms of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, but which radiates out from there into that nexus of fellow poets Creeley refers to as “The Company” (in his Collected Essays), taking company in a more expansive sense to include those like Robinson Jeffers, Muriel Rukeyser, and Kenneth Rexroth, who tend to fall outside customary genealogies. The key organizing principle is the trope, in several senses : trope as trope or turning (which I relate to the Lucretian clinamen or swerve), trope as linguistic cousin to the tropic as geographic situation, and trope as poetry’s composting medium. As a trope, the “field” extends much farther back, of course, so Whitman plays a significant role. Leaves of Grass is a prototype for the long poem of the twentieth century, as Dickinson’s fascicles (however belatedly discovered) serve as precedent for the modern serial poem. This Compost is in part a rumination on three of the most imposing of long poems—The Cantos, “A,” and The Maximus Poems—though they are not accorded equal attention. The point is not nominative, however. By dissociating the name of the poets from many of the citations, I wanted to restore to the poetics at hand that solidarity in anonymity which is the deep issue of planetary time, for that is the “issue” in several senses of the poetry of This Compost.
The senses are several, confirming our attraction to sensory multiplicity as well as multiple meanings. Had Wordsworth been Thoreau, he might have been keen to the pun in his line “we lay waste our lives, getting and spending,” since our lives are matter (mattered) by begetting (in the archaic expression, to “get” with child), and the majority of our expenditures are bodily “waste.” Poetry is a space in which we’re implicitly invited to deliberate on—and make hay with—the puns that calibrate our existence, our mortal exigency. Paul Shepard describes the ethos of hunter-gatherers in terms that are not restricted to the Paleolithic : “The lifelong theme is ‘learning to give away’ what was a gift received in the first place” (“Post-Historic Primitivism,” 70). Wendell Berry gives a concise version as “the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality” (Recollected Essays, 303). “I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me,” declares Emerson of his own essay (“Experience”). The dictum recurs in another formulation : “We are symbols and inhabit symbols” (“The Poet”), an insight founded on the root meaning of symbol, sum-ballein, thrown together. When we think of something “thrown together,” like a quick meal, it is usually in a derogatory sense; but we tend to think of symbols as products of deliberation. Heidegger characterizes Dasein by way of a neologism, “Geworfenheit,” or “thrownness,” by which he means not that we are outcasts, fallen figures expelled from some ancestral wonderland, but that our arrival into a terrestrial life is a forcible event. Watching the birth of my first daughter I had the sense that this wet intensity had been projected from a great distance, she arrived with such force; and how could it be otherwise? Starting out as a zygote nine months earlier, she had swollen like a tropical storm to the incredible magnitude of seven pounds, a concrete reminder that “While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth” (Berry, Recollected Essays, 269). Both she and her sister have grown from infants to women while I was writing this book, and I too have changed with everything around me; but certain challenges persist : the need of long-term views, the need to reckon our own wild natures into any consideration of “nature” as such; and certain pleasures continue to abound, especially the pleasure of good company, the manifold lure of the elements, the tingle of every night and day.