Poet's Petard #4 – May 2021

​“Nature is everywhere – so why even mention it?”

~ Andy Goldsworthy

​Poets have written a lot about this thing called “Nature.” Recently we have nudged “nature poetry” up a notch by calling it “eco-poetry,” and as such, given it a place the human arsenal of possible ways to fend off the Sixth Extinction. I offer here a wee spectrum of attitudes about what possible practical use “nature poetry” can offer our world. The first is my own wry response to Goldsworthy:

“Poetry keeps the concrete from drying around you before you get into a comfortable position.”

​Even Wallace Stevens, who seems to live mainly inside his head, was passionate about the earth. “It's an illusion that we were ever alive,” he says, and his solution is to embrace the illusion head on and declare it to be a good thing – So, he suggests a way to resolve the paradox. If “rock” stands for “ultimate nothingness” then yes, nature covers the rock with flowers and leaves, which are impermanent. But contained within the nothingness of illusion is a cure, which he called “the cure of the ground” – (from “The Rock”):

“It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
 We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground”

​So, he offers a compromise: the poem is the permanence, with its own “leaves,” and with

“Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves.”

​Again, I offer a lighter bulwark against nothingness, a flock of tiny birds:

“I love it when the bushtits come through.
They are like little raindrops falling
among the rosencrantzs and guildensterns.”

​And here is James Stephens in his wonderful fantasy novel The Crock of Gold – The speaker is The Thin Woman of Inis Magrath: 

​“It is strange that we may not be angry while looking on the moon.”

(Try it, next time you've conveniently worked yourself into a rage on a clear night when the moon is out.)

​And finally, from native American poet Jennifer Elise Foerster:

“Spider will weave a ladder to your heart,
it is said, even though you are sleeping,
intoxicated by abandonment
a bitter wind reminiscent of a wave.”

​*And speaking of abandonment, I am grateful to Erik Muller's recent book A New Text of the World: Ways of Looking at the Poetry of Wallace Stevens for drawing my attention again to Stevens, whom I long ago abandoned.