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Geneva M Gano, The Poetry of Ecological Witness: Robinson Jeffers and Camille T. Dungy, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 28, Issue 2, Summer 2021, Pages 727–747, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa088
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We live in an era of profound denial, misdirection, and factual suppression, one in which stark evidence of criminality and abuse of many kinds is widely available, yet seems to count for very little. It is, as poet Cathy Park Hong has proposed, an age in which “one [feels] robbed of one’s eyes” (152). In the past generation or so, as the scientific facts of climate change have been called hoaxes and fake news by leaders of some of the most powerful institutions in human history, the work of ecological witness—that is, of logging evidence of harm to the ecological whole—has come to feel especially urgent and necessary, even as it presents the poet committed to this effort with an unhappy and essentially impossible task. How can one possibly bear witness to the profound ecological devastation and loss that has happened, is happening, and will happen, at scales we limited humans cannot even begin to fully comprehend? If we could ever comprehend and articulate the extent of ecological harm, could it produce meaningful results? That is, could poetry—could we humans, its audience—somehow help interrupt its perpetration and possibly begin to ameliorate its devastations?
As the evidence of ecological harm mounts, questions like these have become increasingly urgent. This essay identifies and defines a particular mode of nature poetry that grapples with these pressing concerns: the poetry of ecological witness. Like nature poetry in general, it broadly represents and celebrates the beauty of the natural world, and it can appear in both experimental and traditional forms, from the experimental ecopoetry of Park and Juliana Spahr to the more direct, if not exactly traditional, work of W.S. Merwin, Joy Harjo, and Camille T. Dungy.1 Its particular focus is on the abuse and endangerment of an expansively defined nature: one defined ecologically, as an inclusive and interdependent system. That is, it not only “show[s] … the bulldozer off to the side” that causes ecological damage and destruction but, in a shift that significantly affects both tenor and tone, moves the vision of the bulldozer to the poem’s center (Spahr 69).
This essay brings together the work of Robinson Jeffers and Camille T. Dungy, two very different poets who have been identified closely with ecopoetry and, more broadly, environmental or nature poetry.2 Jeffers, a white male poet who was active in the early- and mid-twentieth century, has been roundly acknowledged as a progenitor of contemporary environmental poetry (Hume and Osborne 4; Keller 608). For some, his writing reveals his prescient, critical, and expansive ecological thought; for others, his work indicates a notoriously cold, fundamentally inhuman outlook on the earth and its inhabitants. Dungy, black and female, is a contemporary poet whose sensitive receptivity to the natural world has been widely praised; many have noted that her holistic vision of a fragile but surviving earth-community is suffused with a palpable warmth and vitality. Although neither’s work could be mistaken for the other’s, both Jeffers and Dungy serve here as exemplary practitioners of the poetic mode of ecological witness. Significantly, both poets register, while also struggling to accept, the shameful fact that humans have contributed immense harm to the complex, beautiful world in which we all live. As this essay demonstrates, the poetic mode of ecological witness is pervaded by this conflicted recognition: one that implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—demands that the poet and reader act towards reparative restitution so as to contribute meaningfully to the everyday survival of one and all.
The Poetry of Ecological Witness
The ecological mesh is wide; its degradations are many. The acts of harm engaged by the poetry of ecological witness include a broad range of ongoing, real-world devastations, which include mountaintop removal, deforestation, overfishing, and fracking as well as genocide and human trafficking. In exposing these crimes against the ecological whole as crimes against us all, the poetry of ecological witness serves the aims of an intersectional vision of eco-justice, which understands culture, social justice, and the environment to be inseparable from one another (Tuckey 1). Despite its righteous purpose, however, the poetry of ecological witness is complicated by the basic conviction that this crisis was caused by a “self-inflicted wound” (Larmer 2). That is, at the level of species and regardless of personal, individual actions, the human witness is implicated as both victim and perpetrator, accuser and confessor of ecological harm. Though aligned with the activist intention to intervene in the ecological crisis to which it testifies, the poetry of ecological witness is regularly marked by the passivity, if not resignation, if not utter debilitation, of the witness figured within this testimonial work, often presented as the poet themself. Attendant to the compromised position of the human witness, these poems are marked by both a feeling of anguish at the immense scope and seeming inevitability of environmental and ecological catastrophe as well as a pervasive sense of shame that extends beyond a single individual, particular corporation, or political regime to humanity as a whole.
As I use the term here, the poetry of ecological witness belongs to a broader grouping of socially engaged poetry, a mode that Carolyn Forché has called the “poetry of witness.” According to Forché, this is poetry that responds to and records extremity, typically human-caused and political in nature: her examples are “war, suffering, struggle” (167). Its basic impulse is not representational, as in the Romantic mode of spiritual witness that testifies to, by closely describing, God’s grandeur, but evidentiary: “as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood” (163). In Dungy’s words, poetry of this kind does the important work of offering readers “language through which we might come to comprehend what we are losing, what we have already lost” (“The Nature of Nature,” xvi). It preserves and affirms truth, often in the context of denial or erasure, and carefully transmits an urgent message of crisis, one that is in peril of being lost or suppressed.
The poetry of ecological witness, then, testifies to the ecological crisis that has increasingly come to the forefront of political, aesthetic, and spiritual consciousness, particularly in the past generation or so. It acknowledges first, that we indeed face a crisis, against a powerful contingent of deniers who refuse to acknowledge the significance of ongoing and devastating climate change. It also affirms the scientific consensus that identifies humans as major causes of environmental destruction, against those who actively throw suspicion on its primary, human cause. Its ecologically informed understanding of nature as a complex system or vast, interdependent mesh makes its subjects more expansive than those of traditional nature poetry by including the human and the non-human, the living and non-living: flora, fauna, rocks, gasses, all. In this sense, it satisfies the central requirement that poet Forrest Gander establishes for an eco-poem: that it “display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between human and non-human realms.” Its inescapably political topics thus include the massive and intentional poisoning of the earth’s waters, lands, and air; the heedless endangerment and abuse of human and non-human animals; and the desecration of entire landscapes, airscapes, and seascapes. Genocide, war, human trafficking, and global capitalism also fall—of necessity, given the interdependence of the mesh—within its purview: these are seen as part of the larger ecological crisis. In this, its vision exceeds the expectations set forth by John Shoptaw in a recent essay for Poetry, that the ecological poem be both of the non-human natural world and for the non-human natural world, both “environmental and … environmentalist” (395). Humans and the quality of their survival are not separate from the mesh of the ecological but absolutely imbricated in its concept and structure: we are within it and it is within us.
The poetry of ecological witness is invested with an ethical mandate to show evidence—a “duty to tell the truth and shame the devil” in poet Robinson Jeffers’ words—of the human-caused ecological crisis even as it recalls that humans are among the significant victims of its rippling, awful effects.3 Its formal elements generally respond to the injunction to communicate its message of witness effectively. Clear, simple, and just expression, sincerity, and directness are preferred over what Jeffers, alluding to the work of some of his more fashionable contemporaries, referred to as “modern[ist]” “trickery” (“Granddaughter,” CP 3:464). Believability is crucial: witness almost always involves the inclusion of verifiable details and specifics, such as the names of people and places or the dates and times of events, as well as paratexual documents such as maps and informational notes. This believability is typically bolstered by the personal proximity of the speaker to the scene of witness in time or place, but also in terms of emotional, professional, or familial closeness to the subject of witness.
These stylistic elements have a moral weight because the poetry of witness bears an ethical obligation that flies in the face of modernist dictums that “a poem should be palpable and mute,” that it “should not mean / but be” (MacLeish). The poetry of witness, in fact, has a moral duty to “mean” fairly unambiguously and to facilitate an ethical response from the reader. As Forché makes clear, a poem of witness “calls upon the reader, who is the other of this work, to be … marked by what [the poem] makes present before her, what it holds open and begets in the reader” (161). Even as the poet must write justly and clearly, the reader of this poetry is enjoined by the work to read justly and understand well: they must admit the evidence and then share its burden, in their own turn. Witnessing thus involves participation within a circuit of ethical relations, whether it occurs through the language of a poem or in a court of law.
The ethical task of bearing ecological witness produces some unique challenges for the poet. First, the poet faces the sheer impossibility, as a human being with limited perceptive powers, of the task of witness: the vastness of the ongoing ecological crisis, across the wide, interdependent ecological mesh, essentially overwhelms human perception. The witness struggles to dimly perceive even the minimum, that ecological harm extends far beyond our human ability to reckon it, on the one hand, and respond effectively to it, on the other. This may sometimes look like what Lynn Keller has identified in contemporary environmental poetry as “scalar dissonance”: a “cognitive and affective dissonance between what feels like minute individual agency and a context of enormous collective impact” (“Twenty-first Century Ecopoetry” 49). The witness’s human-sized account is bound to be distorted, incomplete, and ineffective; the dissonance is often evident in both the overt topical and the formal elements of the poem. Writing clearly and justly becomes, in effect, an unattainable goal; nonetheless, the ethical call that witness imposes compels the attempt.
The poet also must confront the fact that the task of ecological witness, from a human perspective, is a deeply humiliating one. Gathered and presented, the evidence of ecological crisis points shamefully back to humanity: we accuse ourselves. While the witness may righteously condemn others’ wrongs, bearing ecological witness also inescapably brings the human poet and their relations into the circle of culpability and guilt. Witnessing poses damning questions: Could this have been prevented somehow, by someone (by us)? What could we, should we, have done differently? Why did we do this to ourselves and our world?
These are the kinds of questions that provoke what Primo Levi, writing of the prisoners at Auschwitz, calls the shame of the “just man”: a feeling prompted by “witness[ing] or undergo[ing] an outrage” for which they may not share personal guilt (cited in Agamben, 87). As Levi explains, when confronted by a heinous crime or outrage, the just man “feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense” (ibid). The poetry of ecological witness, which starts from the belief that humanity is part and parcel of the mesh, is saturated with this kind of ethical shame: a basic grief that crimes to the ecological whole exist and an abject feeling of shameful responsibility for humanity’s role—which is our role, whether we are poet or reader—in introducing them to the world. Why have we, as a species, been so apparently incapable of preventing or resisting such atrocities, committed in our name, upon ourselves?
Bearing ecological witness not only requires a frank reckoning with the horrible truth of ecological harm, but it reveals our shameful inability to fulfill our ethical relation even to other humans, let alone the ecological whole. As poems by Jeffers and Dungy show, the role of the poet as witness to ecological devastation is an unhappy one. However, Jeffers and Dungy share a sense that their ecological message is nonetheless both urgent and essential. In bearing witness to the damage resulting from our continuing failure, as a species, to account and care for the others of the mesh—who are also ourselves—they call upon their readers to “awaken,” as Forché has indicated, to their “irrevocable and inexhaustible responsibility to the other” (162).
Robinson Jeffers in Human Relation
Those familiar with Jeffers’ career might shake their heads at this point: as a man who chose as his emblems a solitary hawk and a tower he’d built himself on a remote and lonely coast and who became known not only as an “inhumanist” (his word) and isolationist (others’ word for him), Jeffers hardly seems assimilable to an adamantly social, deeply relational mode of poetry.4 Rather, as a singular white man who heroically refuses his patrimony of Western civilization, Jeffers is more easily accommodated within the exclusive pantheon of hermit-like environmental thinkers and activists in the US (think Thoreau, Muir, Abbey) that, despite recent reevaluations of their legacies, continue to be perceived as “environmental saints” (Buell 339–69). However, a close consideration of Jeffers’ work points toward his struggle to accept his relationality with others rather than a refusal of it. This is highlighted in his poems of ecological witness in which he acknowledges his own embeddedness in the ecological mesh even as he communicates his bewilderment, shame, and humiliation at his human role within it.
Jeffers’ short poem, “The Coast-Road,” seems to reinforce the perception of the heroic, solitary poet by focusing on a horseman, “alone as an eagle,” who curses the road builders whose machinery intrude on his pastoral range; he might be understood as a figure for the ostensibly reclusive, antimodern poet himself. A closer look at the poem shows a more complicated picture of the poet’s relationality. The poem opens with a description of a scene of visual witness, with the horseman as the watcher:
A horseman high alone as an eagle on the spur of the mountain over Mirmas Canyon draws rein, looks down
At the bridge-builders, men, trucks, the power-shovels, the teeming end of the new coast-road at the mountain's base.
He sees the loops of the road go northward, headland beyond headland, into gray mist over Fraser's Point,
He shakes his fist and makes the gesture of wringing a chicken's neck, scowls and rides higher. (CP : 2 522)
The long opening lines direct the reader’s attention to the horseman’s position up on the hills, one that gives him a broad, far-ranging, scope of vision. This heightened perspective offers him an expansive view of the scene below, although the catalogue of the “bridge-builders, men, trucks, … power-shovels” indicate a swarm so extensive that there is literally no end in sight: its evidence disappears into the gray mist of the headlands. His vantage point indicates the clarity of his vision, but he is no impartial observer. Rather, he is a relevant and invested witness; the specific places identified in the poem—Fraser’s Point and Mirmas Canyon—are part of his familiar riding range, indicating his physical proximity to the incursion and its potential to personally impact him.5 The uncommonly hard stresses of the first and fourth lines (those pertaining to the horseman’s actions as he “draws rein, looks down” and “rides higher”) add emphasis to this man’s act of witness (what he “looks… at” and “sees”) as well as his response: his scowl indicates his revulsion to the scene, while his angry gestures and, finally, flight to higher ground serve as small acts of resistance. Though the horseman’s recalcitrant defiance in the face of modern “improvements” will assuredly be ineffectual, his small gesture of active resistance to the scene below him remains visceral and compelling.
The poet enters the poem in the next stanza as a second witness to the scene of desecration. Speaking in the first person, he claims an allegiance with the horseman that he sees up on the hills: “I too / Believe that the life of men who ride horses, herders of cattle on the mountain pasture, plowers of remote / Rock-narrowed farms in poverty and freedom, is a good life” (5–7). Despite his stated and imagined sympathy, however, the poet’s view and response are quite distinct. Though the horseman’s gestures are crude, they are decisive, whereas the elevated speech of the poet, replete with abstract, philosophical musings about the nature of “civilization,” lacks immediacy: the extended comparison he makes between the “vulgar” world and an “old drunken whore” is belabored and—truth be told—tired. While the solitary horseman rides alone and free, contrasting memorably with the “teeming” masses of machinery and men, the poet is situated below and at a distance from the horseman, out of hearing and communication, down among the accursed swarm, subordinated to him both physically and symbolically. Rather than the elevated role of prophet or priest, one the figure of the poet is often said to occupy in Jeffers’ work, here the poet is clearly a less authoritative “participant” in the scene (Hunt 13). The secondary and subordinate position that he occupies here undermines the finely phrased bit of “consolation” that he offers at the conclusion of the poem, that the mountains are “not the least hurt by this ribbon of road carved on their sea-foot.” Instead, we should see the horseman’s angry, defiant response to the road-builders as the primary guide to our own.
In offering the reader dual points of observation and response to the road-builders, Jeffers calls attention to the struggle involved in providing ecological witness. Recognizing ecological harm properly provokes outrage and desire for resistance. However, the ecological whole is a vast and complex system that extends well beyond an individual’s grasp; as the road that disappears into the mist indicates, it also produces in the speaker a sense of despondency and helplessness that may be aligned with the stoicism that Robert Zaller locates in a number of Jeffers’ poems (29–32). Though Jeffers frequently counseled his readers to take on this detached, philosophical attitude of acceptance rather than active resistance, it is important here to note that the poet’s words are—at least in this poem—undermined by the other, more powerful witness that his horseman provides. While the poem ends with the poet’s assertion of faith in the mountain’s “invincib[ility],” this claim, too, is called into question: Will the mountains and coastal range survive, unhurt, the damage inflicted by man? For the reader whose ethical imagination has been engaged by the image of the horseman at the beginning of the poem, the poet’s words are insufficient. The dual perspectives teach us to consider Jeffers’ wisdom a bit more critically and to examine the poet’s prescriptions rather than accept them wholesale.
Like “The Coast-Road,” which directly precedes it in Such Counsels You Gave to Me (1938), “Memoir” presents the reader with a conflicted response to the recognition of vast ecological harm that extends far beyond the realm of the human world. In this case, the stunning opening lines present the poet’s own, horrifying vision in plainspoken language:
I saw the laboratory animals: throat-bandaged dogs cowering in cages, still obsessed with the pitiful
Love that dogs feel, longing to lick the hand of their devil; and the sick monkeys, dying rats, all sacrificed
To human inquisitiveness, pedantry and vanity, or at best the hope
Of helping hopeless invalids live long and hopelessly. (CP2: 524)
This gruesome image of the modern laboratory is made more awful by its sheer length: the speaker seems actually incapable of turning away and drags the reader through the pathetic scene by refusing to cede the conclusion of idea or sentence. The speaker’s revulsion to the evidence of humanity’s sins and misapprehensions is clearly palpable. In the next stanza, this scene is juxtaposed with a longer one, also presented in the view of the first-person witness, that describes ranchers who inflict a similar kind of cruelty while dehorning cattle. The poet observes these men’s unflinching competence at their work and draws a lesson: “These fellows are fit for life, sane men, well-buttoned / In their own skins; rarely feel pain outside their own skins: whilst I like a dowser go here and there / With skinless pity for the dipping hazel-fork.” His confession of weakness acknowledges his individual failure to meet the measure of a “sane,” “well-buttoned,” and “good-natured” man: the poet’s sensitive attunement to the suffering of animals serves as a sign of his almost-unhumanlikeness, his “skinlessness.”
The lesson that the poet draws about his own inhumanity is undermined, though, by the stunning evidence presented at the beginning of the poem: the image of the cowering, mutilated dogs. This persistent image prompts us to reread the poet’s statement for its irony: his sensitivity to the suffering animals alienates him from the humans who prosecute such cruelty while simultaneously serving as a sign of his humane relationship to and responsibility for all within the ecological mesh. In another kind of poem, the poet might feel righteous in his superior difference from the mass of humanity, but here his feelings of abjection are prompted by his relationship to the ranchers, his “friends.” He acknowledges that he shares responsibility, with them, for the human violation of an ecological ethics of care that extends to all within the mesh.
The poet’s sense of shame, as articulated here, corresponds to the shame of the just man as described by Levi. An ascription of personal or individual guilt is not at issue: the poet surely bears no personal culpability for the animal “sacrifice[s]” that he witnesses, and he declines to vilify the ranchers as they go about their work. However, we can see plainly that the deeds are done and justified in the name of humankind: to serve the mass markets, for medical research, out of simple curiosity. This shifts the scope of concern to the ecological and the collective. The poem thus registers what philosopher Lisa Guenther calls an “ethical feeling of collective shame” (63), one prompted by a “moral sensitivity to crimes against humanity” and indeed, I would propose, beyond humanity as well: to the integrity of the ecological mesh (62). As Guenther explains, this kind of ethical shame “emphasizes relations rather than acts,” a distinction that is clearly made in the poem, and “confirms the root of responsibility in our relations with others” (64). The shameful acknowledgement of “intersubjectification” that Guenther describes is particularly appropriate to the poetry of ecological witness. This is because the relational feeling of ethical shame corresponds to the relational concept of the ecological mesh, and asks us to gauge whether we have acted in ethical relation with others—all else—and out of responsibility for and with them.
In the first two stanzas of this poem, the poet is clearly established as an eyewitness to the suffering of animals that he relays. The third and concluding stanza of the poem clarifies Jeffers’ understanding that his relationship to and responsibility for others extends around the world, far beyond his own, first-hand ken, and includes the suffering of his fellow men. Though he claims that it might be possible for him to limit his vision and thoughts to his beautiful “sanctuary” along the central California coast, he clearly cannot push the suffering of others out of his mind:
I need not think beyond the west water, that a million persons
Are presently dying of hunger in the provinces of China. I need not think of the Russian labor-camps, the German
Prison-camps, nor any of those other centers that make the earth shine like a star with cruelty for light…
His repeated refrain, the protest, “I need not think,” demonstrates the very opposite: that indeed he must and does think of their suffering, and cannot push it from his mind. Though he is distant from them—their suffering is an earth away—he understands and responds to a sense of relation with them. The pain he sees firsthand, in the poem’s first two stanzas, is enmeshed with their distant pain; this relationship compels him to bear witness to it as well.
As these two poems by Jeffers demonstrate, the poetry of ecological witness brings the poet and the reader into the circle of relation and makes a call on them to help bear its burden. As humans, we share a collective guilt for ecological harm, even when we are not directly implicated in specific and intentional acts of pollution, endangerment, and abuse. The scene of witness in Jeffers’ poems not only reveals, in specific, evidentiary ways, how human acts defile the beauty of the natural world, it also calls attention to how difficult it is to respond meaningfully to the shameful acts of our own species.
Camille T. Dungy: Individual within the Mesh
Though Black writers are generally expected to produce “political poems, historical poems, protest poems, socioeconomic commentary, anything but nature poems,” Camille T. Dungy’s project of ecological witness deliberately brings these poetic modes together within individual poems and across her oeuvre (“The Nature of African American Poetry,” xxvii). Dungy claims and includes the whole mesh of life within her ecological vision: all, together, are affected by human acts of environmental destruction, social injustice, cruelty, and oppression. Like Jeffers, Dungy expresses a concern that extends well beyond the scope of the merely human to the global and universal; her poems, like Jeffers’ poems, do not exclude humans from a vision of an integrated whole. Her work bears witness to distinctly human and social losses alongside and within a broad vision of “overwhelming” environmental loss. Variously, it includes the popular, charismatic megafauna as well as unloved, invasive plants:
… fewer bats, fewer beavers, fewer bees, fewer Micronesian kingfishers, fewer languages that might describe the world in different words than those favored by the word brokers of the Capitalocene, fewer eyeless shrimp, fewer unpolluted catfish, fewer humans whose lives are not compromised by warfare and its legacies, fewer banana trees, less cedar, less eucalyptus, fewer pecan groves, fewer children whose lives are not diminished by dependence on ruthless resource extraction, fewer elephants, fewer sharks, fewer whales, fewer families with access to potable water. (“The Nature of Nature” xv–xvi)
Even as Dungy registers how the vast scale of the ecological mesh directs us away from personal acts, her work demonstrates the significance of the particularly located position of the witness herself as a distinct individual embedded in the social, political, and physical world. Her poems insist upon the value of the emotional, bodily individual as a crucial ground for the work of ecological witness. This fundamentally informs the articulation of her experience as witness and our own reception of it, as readers in relation with her and within the broader circuit of ecological relation. A look at Dungy’s poem, “The Blue,” can help illustrate how these concerns are entwined in her work and also hint at the strong connections between her work and that of Jeffers. It begins by situating us along California’s Central Coast in the still-wild Carmel Valley of the midcentury:
One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. (Smith Blue, 17–18)
Dungy seems to deliberately invoke Jeffers here, most obviously because she positions scientists Mattoni and Smith squarely within the region that had by then become known, locally and internationally, as “Jeffers Country.” Too, her subject matter—the building of the scenic highway—distinctly recalls “The Coast-Road,” published more than seventy-five years earlier. As a native Californian, Dungy could not help but be aware of Jeffers’ towering legacy, but as she has acknowledged, her debt to Jeffers is more than incidental: a close family friend was a Jeffers scholar and enthusiast who encouraged her aspirations as a poet and put a book of his poems in her hands when she was young (“The View from Hawk Tower Today”).
Just as “The Coast-Road” opens with a vision of “the bridge-builders, men, trucks, the power-shovels, the teeming end of the new coast-road at the mountain's base,” forecasting and protesting a relentless “progress” that will bring hordes of humans to defile the beautiful, remote place, “The Blue” points to the human-operated Caterpillar (the machine, not the insect) that will clear the land and endanger “everyone, everything, / everywhere” along the coastal stretch. The opening lines of “The Blue” deftly signal the ecological insights of the poem’s central figure and witness to ecological harm, the scientist Mattoni, by referring to the centrifugal impacts of human-caused habitat loss. Mattoni’s ability to name the native and invasive plants—seacliff buckwheat, coreopsis, and ice plant—and his discerning attention to the hawk and butterfly identify him as someone familiar with and attentive to the coastal ecosystem he describes: his testimony, like that of Jeffers’ horseman, is credible and proximate.
Mattoni’s observations are not restricted to the realm of impartial science, however. The emotional intensity with which he responds to this loss is so overwhelming that it causes a stutter of assonance. It “endanger[s], everything, / everyone, everywhere.” In the first stanza alone, Mattoni’s perspective reflects dizzying scalar shifts in time (future and present) and space (“whole habitat” to individual footprints) as well as in tone (precise and scientific to broadly effusive). As the poem proceeds, the poem shifts again, juxtaposing temporal scales of present and past, as Mattoni recalls “lov[ing] everything” that he and his friend knew about the canyon country near Dolan’s Creek even as he recalls in intimate detail the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the place (24). Again, the discourse of science and the particularities of a now-lost place are interwoven with emphatically personal, physically grounded memories of his friend’s life and death. By the poem’s concluding line, the scene of witness that it initially presented—that of the destructive impact of human development—is intertwined with the recollection of a deeply felt, personal loss in the symbol of the endangered, “struggling butterfly” that Mattoni names after his deceased friend. The particularly located position of the witness, as scientist and friend, bolsters his legitimacy as a reliable, informed, and proximate witness: this is his story to tell.
As in Jeffers’ “The Coast-Road,” Dungy’s poem offers the reader different physical, philosophical, and emotional vantage points from which the reader may perceive the economy of ecological interrelationship. In “The Blue,” though, these adhere to a single individual (Mattoni) rather than two distinct ones (the horseman and the poet). Mattoni contributes to the social good through his production of scientific knowledge—we observe him, in the poem’s first section, “lecturing” on the rare butterfly—but this poem offers the reader the opportunity to understand Mattoni both in this specific capacity and as a full and feeling human being. As the poem reveals, his motivation to discover and educate are based not in an altruistic or abstract philosophy, but in the emotional and physical impulses of his own body as they respond to the sensations of “that part of California that they hated/to share”: that is, in a lyrically expressed sensation of “love” for the living “source of his pleasure,” which he shared with Smith. Their physical and emotional proximity to that source is compelling to them and to the reader, bringing all into the circuit of relation.
I have so far been emphasizing the lush beauty of the lost landscape as remembered by Mattoni, but it would be a mistake to overlook the fact that the poem’s fundamentally elegiac mood is developed because the loss of habitat and Smith’s death are integral components of the love, the pleasure, and the beauty to which this poem testifies. Indeed, Dungy seems to insist that these cannot exist without the pain of loss that dominates the poem from beginning to end. “The Blue” offers this very Jeffersian consolation in the last section of the poem, proposing that either the butterfly or the man he loved or perhaps even the coastal habitat itself—the syntax of the line makes the subject indeterminable—was “too beautiful / to never be pinned.” This brief, fatalistic assertion of the inevitability of profound loss does not lend itself easily to protest or even complaint; indeed, at this point, the poem seems to collapse away from the political and social work of providing ecological witness and into the language of inconsolable grief. Here, it recalls Dungy’s “Daisy Cutter,” a meditation on the breathtakingly spectacular brutality and gruesomeness of modern warfare that is countered, within the poem, with a comparatively meager, doleful admission of human guilt, one that rings with shame and anguish: “It is horrible, this way we carry on” (Smith Blue 5–6). “The Blue,” however, does not conclude here: it turns grief outward again in the last lines of the poem as Mattoni returns to the work he’d shared with his friend—that is, the social work of contributing to scientific knowledge. He memorializes Smith by naming the butterfly after him, but also by continuing, on his own, the work they had begun together, for the benefit of all of those who remain.
Dungy’s poetic imaginary, founded in the apprehension of death and loss, resonates with that of Jeffers, but may be broadly distinguished from his by an abiding testimony to the persistent struggle towards survival shared by all within the ecological mesh. In the short poem, “Before the fetus proves viable, a stroll creekside in the High Sierra,” Dungy crystallizes and clarifies the meaning of her project by testifying to a vision of tenacious survival emerging from what appears to be pervasive death (7). The title roots us in the real-world place of the High Sierra while also suggesting the particular perspective that situates this brief, fourteen-line poem: that of a newly pregnant woman, an unidentified speaker who can be aligned with the poet herself. It begins with a scene that seems to deliberately recall Jeffers’ well-known poem, “Salmon Fishing,” one Dungy is familiar with (“The View from Hawk Tower Today”): both present a dramatic scene of witness in which the speaker watches salmon that are attempting to swim upstream to spawn, and both recruit the reader as a participant in the vision. Dungy’s poem begins with its thesis: “It seems every one is silvered, dead, / until we learn to see the living.” Dungy here lays out her strategy of bearing witness to loss and struggle even as she instructs herself, and us, to continue to look to the future: we share her speaker’s struggle to bear witness. The precise observations of the natural world that distinguish much of Dungy’s work come forward in the description of the struggling fish, even as her vision expands dramatically to recall “the great laws of the universe– / current, gravity, obsolescence.” Her view contracts again in the final lines of the poem as her focus sharpens to distinguish “these still / living red ones” whose work of survival continues. Dungy describes them lovingly, protectively, as
The obstacles facing the fish—fatigue, the elements, and powerful predators—make even short-term survival seem a fantastic dream, as the very slow, trance-like movement suggests.
As in Jeffers’s “Salmon Fishing,” this depiction of the struggle to survive, to progress, and to carry life forward literally occupies the center of the short poem. Although the scene is saturated with death, Dungy’s speaker deliberately and insistently affirms the persistence of life—she is determined to “see the living”—thereby shifting the poem’s emphasis towards its implicit frame: the already-gestating fetus carried by the unnamed speaker and mentioned fleetingly in the poem’s long title. The poem does not explicitly address the implied relationship between the fish and the fetus, but in gesturing towards the frame, it makes a call on the reader to draw a connection between the spectacular scene of death and struggle that the newly pregnant woman witnesses and that which her own child will encounter on his or her precarious life journey. This meditation on the struggle for survival reflects the thoughts of not just any stroller, we recall, but those of a hopeful, anxious mother-to-be, a black woman whose feelings of anticipation for the “little life” that is growing inside her forms the explicit substance of the following poem in the collection and a general context for the collection as a whole. Her hope is a hope against odds, knowing the odds, one that does not displace the overwhelming menace of death and violence to which Dungy’s speaker bears witness. The hope and the menace, both, remain central to her vision, forming a foundation from which even the speaker’s very intimate anticipation of joy and apprehension of beauty emerges. Though the speaker of this poem must deliberately “learn to see” life in the midst of death, the fact of death’s presence is undeniable, unavoidable, almost—almost—overwhelming.
This sobering thought recurs throughout Dungy’s work of ecological witness, its significance resonating beyond the strictly natural world through the more properly human one to which it is always connected. The struggle for black people’s survival and fulfillment in a world damaged by racism, one marked by precarity, resilience, and ongoing struggle, is emphatically part of these poems’ ecological imaginary. Throughout Trophic Cascade, the death and loss that is married to the hope for new life, even in the most unremarkably mundane moments, is deliberately racially marked at key points. For instance, “Frequently Asked Questions: #10” does not announce itself as a poem that testifies to the persistent, recurring sense of trauma felt by a mother, daughter, and wife in a racist world (63–63). Instead, the poem opens in the most mundane of ways: Dungy situates the speaker at her kitchen window in suburban Colorado on a fall morning, watching birds at the feeder, with her family—father, husband, daughter—around her.
The quotidian drama of the poem, hardly drama at all, traces a family discussion about how they might get rid of the messy, greedy, noisy grackles that have taken over and scared away the other birds. However, the poem’s loving description of the bright, black beauty of the “revile[d],” targeted birds returns us to the question in italics that prefaces the family discussion and forms the otherwise unaddressed frame for the poem, the question indicated by the poem’s title: “Do you see current events differently because you were / raised by a black father / and are married to a black man?” In 2017, the year of the poem’s publication, the “current events” obliquely alluded to in the question surely refer to the ongoing violence and brutality directed toward black men that had received increased attention because of the activist work of the Black Lives Matter movement. As black Americans, Dungy and her family are both proximate witnesses to and survivors of this violence; their lives are impacted daily by its relentless roll. Dungy’s response to this frequently asked question and to the continuous barrage of the horrific “news” is this poem about her family, which reorients our attention (the poet “put[s] down [her] newspaper” to look at the birds) in order to testify to the everyday value and beauty in black life. Despite her initial complaints about the grackles, the poet seems to connect these unloved birds with her own family members, whose own, living presence is constantly under threat. In the midst of debating how to get rid of the grackles, in two separate asides that Forché might describe as “fissures of written speech” (161) or textual evidence of the wounds that she bears, she affirms her gratitude that her father is “still alive.” The poem’s metaphor is strengthened in its conclusion, which affirms their presence in words that surely also apply to her husband and father: “I pray they will stay.”
If the evidence that this poem ultimately offers leads us to consider racial injustice and its traumatic intrusion into the most quotidian moments of everyday life, as I have been proposing, an ecocritic might wonder if its message is sufficiently ecological. This poem, however, works against longstanding, restrictive definitions of nature and the environmental in important ways. Not least of these are the atypical central subjects of the poem, whose presence challenge us to include them within the established discourse of nature: the family (as opposed to the solitary birder or mountain man), the suburban and mundane (as opposed to the wild and the sublime), the blackness of both humans and birds (as opposed to the red, gray, and blue named in the poem), and the mouthy, commonplace grackles themselves (who are neither rare nor skittish). If we situate the conversation between the poet and her family within the discourse of native habitat and species restoration, a widespread goal of conservationist groups around the country, their shared goal of ridding themselves of the locally invasive and undesirable grackles might be posed as a recognizably environmental one. If this is their goal, though, they seem to be going about it all wrong: the birds are at a feeder stuffed with seed, not foraging from carefully chosen plants and cultivated insects, and the family seems more interested in how pretty the birds are than how appropriate they are to their microregion. Dungy seems to be initially raising these more narrow and more typically “natural” and environmentalist possibilities within her poem—a common enough gesture in contemporary ecopoetry—only to deliberately undercut them. As the poem progresses, the poet’s observations of the grackles become more scientifically informed, more minutely detailed, and more lyrical as she develops the suggestive metaphor to her own family members. Dungy’s speaker indicates and models for the reader what it means to trace the web of interrelation; as she observes them and learns about the unloved birds, she begins to comprehend her relation to them and moves towards an ecological ethic of care for all else. We, as readers, are captivated by her captivation by the birds, learning their value as she does. Perhaps, if we heed the call that the poem makes, we can begin to imagine value for others for whom we have insufficiently accounted.
Learning to See the Living
In their poems of ecological witness, Camille T. Dungy and Robinson Jeffers consistently affirm their “irrevocable and inexhaustible responsibility to the other” even as they respond very differently to it. While Jeffers imagined and articulated his relation to all else in the world, from sardines to rocks to stardust in outer space, his relationship with other humans caused him great shame and anguish. He often directly proclaimed his own self-sufficiency, counseled moderation in “love of man,” and, when speaking in the first-person voice of the poet, carefully modulated his tone so as to convey a distanced, philosophical stance rather than a personal, emotional response to the revolting injustice he witnessed at small and large scales. In his work, his deeply felt, ethical shame for the misdeeds of humankind produced Jeremiad-like rebukes of scorn and anger as well as abject cries of lamentation and resignation such as this one, from “Original Sin”: “I would rather / be a worm in a wild apple than be a son of man. / But we are what we are” (CP3: 203). Jeffers’ work emanates extreme shame, humiliation, and anger at his own species’ responsibility for social and environmental injustice, yet it nonetheless persistently answered to what he felt were his obligations or “birth dues”: his moral duty or “ethical imperative” (Forché 169) to express his criticism of human actions and concern for the future of humankind and the wide world. Rather than washing his hands of humanity, Jeffers’ poetry of ecological witness registers the strain of the resolutely human work of engagement.
Camille T. Dungy’s wide-ranging body of work also consistently presents the reader a holistic, ecological vision of our enmeshed world, one that reveals our relation to all else. Yet Dungy’s work, too, is marked extensively and pervasively by an apprehension of apocalypse and ever-present cruelty, death, and loss at often entwined personal and global scales: as she unflinchingly affirms, there are no “predatorless terrains,” in either the human or nonhuman worlds (“Notes on what is always with us,” Trophic Cascade 33–34). Though her poetry of ecological witness frequently expresses a personal and collective sense of shame and bewilderment for what humans have wrought, she also honors the concerted effort of reckoning with the broad facts of ecological crisis as well as the intimate feelings of anguish and shame it can produce. As her poems indicate, this reckoning is required in order to survive and to honor that survival: we must “learn to see the living.” Though we, as humans, have repeatedly demonstrated either an inhumane incapacity or unwillingness to care for all else, Dungy’s work reminds us, again and again, that each individual has significant place within the larger ecological mesh. In other words, it is our sense of irrevocable relation to others that may be able to help us to survive, while we can, as well as we can.
This final point seems to me to suggest a direction for how we might think through a debilitating environmental apocalypticism, one that seems to lead inevitably towards an immobilizing ethics of resignation and acceptance of both quotidian violations and imminent total annihilation. As Lynn Keller has understood it, poetry of this kind can provoke a feeling of “profound emotional and cognitive exhaustion” in its readers, though certainly that is not what the poetry of ecological witness is supposed to do (“Making Art” 21). While these are reasonable enough responses to the terrifying environmental crisis that we and our world face, Dungy’s work shows us another way. She argues for acknowledging the persistence, courage, and beauty involved in seeing and working small, in and through our own most immediate homes, even as we also see and work towards a larger goal. The outrages of our loss and grief cannot be passed over or minimized, but ecological witness also involves the restorative work of recognizing moments of kindness, mutual help, and the everyday dignity of the living.
Footnotes
I situate the mode of ecological witness within the capacious category of nature poetry, especially in its more politicized subgenres of environmental and ecopoetry, as proposed and defined by including field-establishing critics Leonard Scigaj and Laurence Buell and extended more recently by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, Jonathan Skinner, among others.
A simple indicator of their shared prominence in this field may be the inclusion of both Jeffers and Dungy in Fisher-Wirth’s Ecopoetry Anthology (2013).
Jeffers, Collected Poetry 4: 372. Hereafter, all references to Jeffers’ five-volume Collected Poetry will be abbreviated CP.
Jeffers’ “inhuman” and “cold, discriminating nature” has been overemphasized to the point of occluding the very close relationships with family, friends, and neighbors that are apparent in his newly published, complete correspondence (Gano, Karman).
More, his integration into this particular ecosystem identifies him as a privileged figure amongst Jeffers’ minor characters, an example of human survival and satisfaction in an otherwise violently destructive environment. This suggests that his decisive responses to the incursion should be considered exemplary (Hart 77).