David Wagoner's Environmental Advocacy

David Wagoner's Environmental Advocacy Ronald E. McFarland University of Idaho Who, among the poets of the Pacific Northwest, speaks for the environment? The most obvious answer is a rhetorical question: Who doesn't? But one must be careful about terms here. Poets of the Pacific Northwest (from Alaska through Oregon and including Idaho and perhaps Montana as well as the appropriate Canadian provinces) are often, though not always, properly described as "regionalists," and regionalists are perhaps inevitably concerned with the environment, at least in the loosely used sense of the term—their "surroundings." They often reflect in their work a broad range of mythic (or stereotypical?) visions ofthe West: wide open spaces, Big Sky, the last frontier, rugged individualism, distance, isolation, harsh beauty. The landscape shapes, sometimes warps, character, and that has been a powerful motif in Western literature, including that of the Pacific Northwest. I prefer, though, to distinguish between the term "environment," as it is presently used with reference to political issues concerning our surroundings, and "landscape," or natural setting. The writer who is concerned mostly with how landscape shapes character, either individual or social, is not necessarily the same as the one who is primarily concerned with how people exploit or scar the landscape. It is the latter that we now generally designate "environmentalists" or "environmental advocates." So, more accurately, my question is, which poet speaks most forcefully for the threatened environment of the Pacific Northwest? Theodore Roethke, who some regard as the dean of Pacific Northwest poetry, moved from the greenhouse world of his earlier poems to a broader but still visionary realm in The Far Field (1964). The poems from the North American Sequence, which doubtless inspired David Wagoner's sequences, seek to answer the spiritual question posed in "The Longing": "How to transcend this sensual emptiness?" Wagoner's sequences, from Travelling Light (1976) to The Land Behind the Wind (1983), are certainly reminiscent of Roethke's, but they are all quite specifically located in the Northwest. Roethke's geographical locale remained in Michigan, as is obvious in "Meditation at Oyster River." William Stafford, who chronicles his departure from Kansas for 8 Rocky Mountain Review Oregon in West of Your City (1960), writes in "The Well Rising," "I place my feet / with care in such a world" (52). In the much anthologized title poem from Traveling Through the Dark (1962), the speaker faces a dilemma on a narrow river road, where he can "hear the wilderness listen" before he decides "for us all" and pushes the recently dead doe whose fawn is still alive over the cliff (61). Perhaps no poet has been more sympathetic and loving in his response to the world around him than Stafford. As he writes in "Always," from Stories That Could Be True (1977), "I live as a friend of trees" (4). An avid fisherman who loved the outdoors, Richard Hugo often locates his poems "in nature." But if, as in "Cataldo Mission" (from The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, 1973), he laments Smelterville, Idaho, where he finds "A stream so slate with crap / the name pollutes the world" (43), his focus remains on the people who inhabit the often desolate, "gray" towns of Montana and the dilapidated coastal sites of his native Washington. In the Pacific Northwest Hugo found a "landscape of impermanence" (67), as Sanford Pinsker puts it, "a great sounding board against which he could conduct a search for identity" (57). His poems are located in specific places, to which he stakes an emotional claim, but those places are most often "triggering towns." Hugo's obsession with place rarely leads him to plead the causes of the environmentalist in his poems. Of course the contemporary poets of the Pacific Northwest are not all "regionalists" in the sense that Hugo was or that, to a lesser extent, Stafford is. Tess Gallagher's reflections on her father in poems like "Boat Ride" and "Woodcutting on Lost Mountain" are located specifically in the vicinity of the Olympic Peninsula, but she is above all a poet ofthe personal. Spokane native Carolyn Kizer rarely attaches her poems to Northwest landscapes. Shelley, Idaho, native Kenneth O. Hanson, who retired recently from teaching...