Comments to eco-poets Allison Cobb, Steve Collis & Brian Teare

Dear Allison, Steve, Brian:

Sending this before I head off for another bout of protesting the UHM budget cuts. The conversations have been fascinating. Some thoughts, not intended (in the least) as criticism, but as participation:

--[Allison Cobb's power point on plastics & her research on them highlighted the networks that join us & our plastics.] The emphasis on connections that you all make: as someone interested in how to write about spirit, which inevitably means connections, links, I find myself getting swept up into a kind of negative sublime here. How does one write about spirit-connections without using the words of the world, matter? How can one do it while acknowledging the insufficiency and destructiveness of so many connections, while finding ways to honor those we feel on our meditation pillows?

--Perhaps one way is to value attention over attachment. The meditative poem pauses long enough to notice, but does not stop, does not reach out to take the thing or idea and put it in a sack like plastic rubbish. Plastic is the opposite of meditation. I can imagine a Clark Coolidge-like "The Plastic Text," instead of "Crystal," even as the content would necessarily be different. The notions of "desire" and "grief" and "fear" are all attachments. We can feel desire for plastic as easily as for a flower. It's hard to realize that we need to let go of both flower and plastic, if perhaps in different ways.

--According to Steve's important work, the way those of us are non-indigenous have to connect to the land may be by way of the idea of the commons. But don't we need to separate that out from the fact that rich aristocrats could send their horses across the commons to hunt foxes in 18C England? That that historical period was also fraught with chasms between rich and poor, employer and toiler? That the commons was perhaps not a solution, but another wedge between anger and action? How can we create a commons not attached to bad economics, but to what Steve later called "a basic level of care for all human beings" that our societies ought to provide?

--Is poetry then a rubbish to energy project? Or is analogy itself, Eliot's catalyst, suspect now? I  I switched from poetry to prose poetry at the point at which I found the drive of my poems to be toward abstraction (a gathering of objects toward an idea) rather than as a consideration of the world in front of me. That tension remains in the spaces between the sentences, and I can't seem to live without it.

--I wonder where Allison sees the end point of research into the car part that generated her project, Autobiography of Plastic? If you could find the very hole in the ground, what then? Back to considerations of origins (which we tend to value) over what comes after (which we tend to suspect). As an adoptive mother whose children both know members of their birth families, I understand both the lure of origins and the significance of the families that come after. I honor my children's ancestors, but I am their parent. The adoption of the car part is quite profound, to my mind, because it exists apart from its definite, marked history. It enters the world of the mystery, again miming the spirit, without being part of it.

--So I'd come at this from a spiritual and an adoptive poetics. Adoption need not be appropriation, though many people come at it from that angle. Spirit need not discard the words of this world, though we do need to be suspicious of Emersonian gyres of meaning that fail to address material problems on the ground.

Sorry if this seems redundant. But I needed to think it out a bit this morning. Finding your visits wonderful and various. Just wish they were not in the "deep, dark November" of the semester's soul!

aloha, Susan

PS This has been revised from an email sent to the poets a few days ago.

11/21/2014 Introduction to the eco-poets: Allison Cobb, Brian Teare, Stephen Collis

There's a short film among the 32 about Glenn Gould where the Canadian pianist walks into a truck stop and sits alone at a table. The background noise—conversations between truckers, a waitress taking orders, breaking off a relationship—comes forward like counterpoint from a Bach fugue. Among the scatter, Gould is a gatherer, one who notices. For many of us, this is a rare experience, this act of paying attention (odd mercenary verb). “You missed that,” writes Alexandra Horowitz in her book, On Looking: A Walker's Guide to The Art of Observation. “You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.” Until a few of us walked across a small section of this campus on Tuesday, we had thought the campus pristine. Forty-five minutes after we started, we had filled three black plastic bags full of cups, sandwich containers, straws, bags, styrofoam bits, a blue flag, a pink tassel, one pink rubbah slippah, a sour and dirty melange of objects that washed up on the shores of our campus (as Allison Cobb puts it). What we consume, consumes us.

On Wednesday, a dozen students and faculty sat around this heap of trash; we made fellowship of it, talked about our connections to it. Allison Cobb, who works as a writer for the Environmental Defense Fund in Portland, Oregon, takes walks in her neighborhood and picks up bits of plastic. She takes photographs of plastic, labels bits of it, “desire,” “fear,” “grief.” She does research on her trash, considers her relation to it, thinks about networks of connections between us and our disposables. To some extent, she argues, we are plastic, because we have ingested some of what we threw away; it comes back to us by way of fish and birds, even our beer. We throw plastic away; we don't mourn its loss. Allison, whose book, Greenwood, detailed history and reportage of a Brooklyn cemetery that my grad students loved, will read from her ongoing project, Autobiography of Plastic.

Steve Collis comes to us from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he teaches at Simon Fraser University's Burnaby campus. Like Allison, he is obsessed with the materiality of networks: he is currently involved in protesting the Kinder Morgan pipeline that runs from northern Alberta's tar sands to Vancouver. Kinder Morgan, a Texas oil company, means to tunnel through Burnaby Mountain on the way. The protests have been so successful that Steve and his colleagues are being sued for $5.6 million dollars in damages by the corporation. In this work, Steve has allied himself with indigenous groups whose land is being desecrated. His own poetry finds connections to the land by way of the commons, land that is shared, rather than parceled out to the highest bidder and then made into a luxury condo in Kakaako. A recent book, DECOMP, co-authored with Jordan Scott, follows on a project of placing Darwin's Origin of Species in different bio-regions of B.C., then picking them up a year later, tracing their natural decomposition.

Brian Teare grew up in Alabama, and has lived in Indiana and California before his current stay in Philadelphia, where he teaches at Temple University. At Temple, he asks his students to research their watershed, find out where the water they drink comes from. In his poetry, he meditates on nature, sex, dying, the big issues. He is author, most recently, of the beautiful book, Companion Grasses. He engages a natural world ruined by human beings in this passage from “Susurrus Stanzas.” Read page 20.

What we consume, consumes us. We desire, fear, grieve over what was once contained by plastic, but stays on this earth as an empty, permanent, impermeable, container. But what we notice perhaps does not. To pay attention is not to consume but to honor and to release, not to say “this is ours,” but to let go of our need to grasp: On your next walk across campus, pick up one of these containers. Spend some time with it. Think about its relationship to you and your friends. Then let it go, in a bin.

No Poetry But in Fact: Allison Cobb's _Green-Wood_

[grave site at Valley of the Temples, Ahuimanu, O`ahu]


A gravestone offers facts: name, dates, relationships. It also--through these same channels and that of its narrow platform--offers poem. The gravestone is in equal measure original (here lay one particular person) and derivative (formal choices few, language abstract). The hyphen between dates turns us all into quotations.


Allison Cobb's Green-Wood traces the history of a cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. It begins aptly with two head-notes: quotations, titles, names, dates. The poet doesn't yet speak for herself, but first through an 1857 book about the cemetery by Nehemiah Cleaveland. His words are transplanted into hers:


You are about, kind Reader, to enter and explore a still yet populous Village of the Dead. Through its labyrinths of roads and footpaths--of thicket and lawn--you will need a guide. Take one that will be silent and unobtrusive, and not unintelligent.


By virtue of its being quotation, that last sentence sounds a note of humility, but these words describe the poet's mien, her task. She is no Virgil, more a ranger, or arranger. In the final section of her book, Cobb makes several poetic moves that she soon turns against: "That arc, it's fake," she writes (127). After one particularly high-flown phrase, she re-turns back: "No that's Poetry-swagger, false, a cover like / the cemetery = sleep" (129). Swagger is false metaphor, is the Victorians' substitution of "falling asleep" for "dying." Graveyards are incomparable places.


Metaphors there are in this book, but they emerge from square sections of text. The book's form is that of short prose paragraphs, slabs really, or gravestones that appear on the page with aisles between them. It's there reader walks with poet: "Wait. I came to know the place by waiting. Not waiting. By standing still and also walking. I lived. From the Old Teutonic stem 'to remain'" (8). Cobb's book often traces words back to their origins, stems, in this way. But the poet takes reader on a tour of life between its origin and end. That pathway is historical, not transcendent, even if part of the history of the cemetery is embedded in Cobb's research on the American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Beecher Stowe among them.


If there is a starting place to this book for Cobb, it's 9/11. I can't find the marker just now, but Cobb writes of hearing about the attacks on the World Trade Center off the radio of a delivery truck. The driver too happily announces there will be revenge; he promises that the unmarked cemetery that lower Manhattan becomes will be replicated elsewhere. This is reproduction, but of a deathly kind. Among the graves are many of people killed on 9/11, others of soldiers killed in Iraq. Beside the stones Cobb finds objects:


stars and stripes pinwheel glow-in-the-dark
angel muddy stuffed bunny face
down near Crescent Water
Batman action figure frog riding a bicycle
Virgin of Guadalupe pen
DADDY WE MISS YOU pumpkin (33)


So much unsaid, yet visible to the eye: American patriotism (jingoism), the Hispanic/Catholic dead father, perhaps a soldier; the autumn season (with Halloween lurking in the pumpkin); the kids' toys; the odd humor of a frog riding a bicycle. Cobb calls these "juicy intervals" (33).


Although the objects appear at seeming random, they make an awful sense, one that draws the poet into the story. On one walk, Cobb finds an airplane part, clearly off the Airbus on its way to the Dominican Republic that crashed in November, 2001, making that autumn even more grim. (It's easy to forget that anthrax was traveling through the U.S. mail during that time, as well, dealing its own manner of death and terror.) On the discovered tag is manufacturing information, a kind of headnote in the airplane's memory. Having recorded the PART NO. of the airplane, Cobb notes that "The first five digits match my Social Security number" (32). The moment is sublime, but it's a bureaucratic, corporate sublime that draws a witness into its vortex. The uncanny identifies a "horse of disaster" with the poet whose eyes are glued to her grove of graves.


Before I return to groves, let me quote another bit of connective tissue, one about connection: "Ovid in the Fasti wages a pitched battle between order and chaos says the classicist Barbara Weidon Boyd. She discerns patterns in the seemingly unrelated episodes that keep sending us back, inviting us to make new connections between previously unconnected phenomena" (93). The cemetery does not come with a map, but with these landmark passages that teach us how to read the book about the cemetery.


And again, of Emerson and Benjamin: "Each focused on the minuscule as a container or concentration of the whole, hoping to encounter in the small and minute not just emblems or symbols but an actual instance of the all in concentrated form--as Benjamin wrote, the crystal of the total event" (120).


When you begin to stitch connections, you find yourself linking activities: walking, observing, researching. You stack up histories: Revolutionary, Transcendental, the Vietnam War, 9/11, Iraq. You put together etymologies, facts, objects, land, birds, 19th century collections, trees. You put many of these in lists, along with the names of drugs and pesticides. You take down names of the dead who have left their influence in the poet's thinking: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Linnaeus, N. Cleaveland, Alfred Russel Wallace, Walter Benjamin, Birute M.F. Galdikas. You note land that has been taken and/or devastated from the American Colonies to Papua New Guinea. You consider that the poet is at once naturalist, historian, citizen, and mother.


Or, she wants to be a mother. Cobb, who is partnered to a woman, undergoes fertility treatments, has frozen sperm shipped to her doctor, tries and tries again. She walks through the Village of Death, and cannot seem to enter a region of new life. Presented as fact, the name of the fertility drug, Clomid, bears affect in its trace. There is no baby at the end of the book. That is not metaphor or narrative arc. That is fact.


America is death-drenched, but cannot grieve. Like Emerson his late wife and then his son, America digs up its dead and then keeps quiet. "Of these experiences, Emerson recorded nothing" (72). Like Mayor Bloomberg, perhaps, Emerson was embarrassed by grief. Of some families he spoke to a year after 9/11, Bloomburg said, "It's not my business to say that to a woman, 'Suck it up and get going,' but that is the way I feel. You've got to look to the future" (72). The silences of the private sphere become screams from the public, another of the graveyard's paradoxes.


A cemetery's future lies not simply in its dead, but also in its trees. Cobb writes lists of the trees she sees at Green-Wood. She also writes about arsenic that's used as a preservative in wood. And she chronicles the perverse process of transplanting trees to New Jersey before planting them at the WTC site because New Jersey's climate is the same at that of New York City. "Those that can't adjust--the weak and the dying--will be 'culled' before planting" (70). When Green-Wood gets too crowded, an old tree is cut to clear the ground. Fertility and infertility alternate in the cemetery, but perversely, through human agency (transplanting, culling, poisoning, cutting, treating).


The fact of art a trace (9). Facts are made things, not truths. In this book, Cobb has constructed her paragraphs to offer us traces to the facts we make. Fact is not inert object, then, but a series of connections, the tissue of stories we tell ourselves about American history. The back jacket tells us that this book is "poetry" and also "American Studies." But what I love most about this back cover space is that, though it folds over a book of epitaphs, it offers up no blurbs.


What the book does contain is "heart pillow wrapped in a plastic grocery bag" (38). No aura here, but an amazing work of documentary poetry. Gravestones, like photographs, are not original, but the (mechanical) re-productions of image and text in Cobb's book offer us a point from which to contemplate our own citizenship, and to hope to parent a better world.



Allison Cobb, Green-Wood. Queens, NY: Factory School, 2010. Buy it here.

For more on Factory School, click this link.