(1)
(2)
Elizabeth Jane-Burnett’s poetry aims to take us into a medium of perception beyond ourselves, into the natural world, into an object-perception unlittered by human consciousness. At times this becomes pure song, at times this becomes a sort of balladic documentation, as if a voice rising to a lilt and to an un-lilt:
herring gull
black-headed gull
arctic tern
oystercatcher
turnstone
sanderling
carrion crow
jackdaw
white wagtail
rock pipit
peregrine
kestrel
buzzard
brent goose
cormorant
kingfisher
farther out
gannet
One has only the preposition here, sandwiched in a pure stream of species, as if a child counting or becoming conscious, as if the ‘human’ ornaments of symbols and associations and adjectives are no good here.
It does waterfall to a great question: what is eco-poetry, and what makes it especially eco? Despite Jane-Burnett’s profoundly different poetry, and the way it emerges and becomes organic, is ensouled, in performance, there’s still an insufficiency in its presence in the ‘poetry market’ (if so can be termed): like other poems, it is printed on zombified and processed trees.
I’ve become conscious after the publication of Poems Sketched Upon the M60 that the same is true, here. No matter how much the poems in the collections implicitly warn against the encroachment of air travel upon the territory of stray cows, or aim to poetically and pretentiously and remotely reconstruct the spoken word of extinct animals, or whatever other eco-poetical contrivance, the ‘raw materials’ of the collection are the mass-production unconsciously carved dead letters of woodland sprites.
What ‘resources’ are then available to the radical eco poet, if such a species can be said to exist? For ecopoetry requires some liberation from the constancy of the cycle. Ecopoetry requires a sacramental movement away from a mass production that is destroying our planet in an unprecedented way.
I think it’s for this reason that (1) and (2) might be some of the most thorough ‘eco-poems’ I have, in the sense that they are grounded perceptually in their environment, in the sense they are not poems but involve an ‘ecological’ insistence upon every facet of space and time and breath. For eco-poetic reasons every collection churned out by the faceless Gods of the printing matrix must be imbued with its entirely personal tattoo. Equally, the performance of the poetry, outside of the stuffy citadels whereby poetry is performed, must endure the acoustic imprint that is the summation of modern life and the modern environment. If this is a poetry grounded in its environment, let it be grounded in the harsh reality of the Anthropocene, in the real tug of war of the world, the Nature we have made our prisoner.
~
Is it thus that ‘eco-poetry’ is only that poetry that is meaningfully situated, that seems to derive its allegory not from the (perhaps semi-ironic) Nature-spurning of Matthew Arnold but the notion of a real place, and the environment that entangles and overlaps and encases it? But thus we struggle to attain any wilderness, anywhere unshaped by human beings. Charles Tomlinson, who just encountered organically, and situatedly, in an Oxfam bookshop, whose hand was addressed to Paula, 1981, whoever or whatever that was, a resource I have to hand, part of the current literary echosystem that is before me, has this poem, ‘The Hand at Callow Hill Farm’:
Silence. The man defined
The quality, ate at his separate table
Silent, not because silence was enjoined
But was his nature. It shut him round
Even at outdoor tasks, his speech
Following upon a pause, as though
A hesitance to comply had checked it –
Yet comply he did, and willingly:
Pause and silence: both
Were essential graces, a reticence
Of the blood, whose calm concealed
The tutelary of that upland field
Ivan Illych has silence as a ‘commons’; I think this poem is, by a certain criteria, an ‘eco-poem’, in the sense that it is depicting a subject so perfectly of his or her environment that such an environment does not deserve to be told or spoken of. The environment itself does not emerge until the final line, as if we swerve back towards it: the subject is merely a ‘hand’ and the notion of Callow Hill Farm is more powerful by knots, the subject as other subject. Even if we have no idea what goes on at Callow Hill Farm; these details are immaterial; the biodiversity is merely taken for granted, a perfect synecdoche. Poems that situate us, however, can also be elegies, and this is the case with Clare’s later work, taking us apparently to the specific ‘round oak’ that used to form a memory centre in Helpston, the village of his childhood – in ‘The Round Oak’ (mirroring the similarly titled ‘Lamentations of Round Oak Waters’:
The apple top’t oak in the old narrow lane,
And the hedgerow of bramble and thorn
Will n’er throw their green on my visions again,
As they did on that sweet dewy morn:
When I went for spring pooteys’ and birds’ nests to look,
Down the border of bushes ayont the fair spring;
I gathered the palm grass close to the brook,
And heard the sweet birds in thorn-bushes sing.
I gathered flat gravel stones up in the shallows
To make ducks and drakes when I got to a pond.
The reedsparrow’s nest it was close to the sallows,
And the wren’s in a thorn bush a little beyond;
And there did the stickleback shoot through the pebbles,
As the bow shoots the arrow quick darting unseen,
Till it came to the shallows where the water scarce drebbles,
Then back dart again to the spring-head of green.
The nest of the magpie in the low bush of whitethorn,
And the carrion crow’s nest on the tree o’er the spring,
I saw it in march on many a cold morning,
When the arum it bloomed like a beautiful thing;
And the apple top’t oak aye as round as a table
That grew just above on the bank by the spring,
Where ever saturday noon I was able
To spend half a day and hear the birds sing.
But now there’s no holidays left to my choice
That can bring time to sit in thy pleasures again;
Thy limpid brook flows and thy waters rejoice,
And I long for that tree but my wishes are vain.
All that’s left to me now I find in my dreams:
For fate in my fortune’s left nothing the same;
Sweet apple top’d oak that grew by the stream
I loved thy shade once, now I love but thy name.
This poem is of relevance to anyone thinking about eco-poetry because it is the failure of eco-poetry itself, the failed attempt to conjure a situatedness, a particular environment, that was particular so therefore transient – like Callow Hill Farm, it is merely a ‘name’, as so many roads and towns bear the imprimatur of past rusticity. There are mythological resonances here, is this an Arthurian reference?, as well as the ‘circular narrative’ of the Round Oak, as we are led round it, or the memory of it, or the attempted memory of its tangled neurons. Clare, who was so determined to write (anachronistically) eco-poetry of and for the moment that he took to the fields, using his hat as a writing desk, is now following a circle round aimlessly, the circular contours of a memory of a truly encapsulated spatio-temporal organ. Clare admits the failure of eco-poetry, provided we ever find ourselves confined, old, unable to experience the outdoors except as a memory.
Or we may say that Round Oak is clearly in Clare’s visions, he remembers even the ‘stickleback’. And therefore this is a triumph of eco-poetry, a showing that eco-poetry does not have to be authentically plucked from the woods but can merely be the regurgitation of a previous situatedness. In other words, perhaps we don’t have to be purely swimming, perhaps eco-poetry can be reflective or meditative as long as we remembered correctly. Remembering one farm, one spot, one locality, in its fullness, it is more ‘ecological’ to return to it.
Just as unoriginality may be the most authentic ‘eco-poetry’.
Squidditas 