In this Book
- This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry
- Book
- 2002
- Published by: University of Georgia Press
Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s--Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan--and their successors. But This Compost extends to include earlier poets like Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other contemporary poets. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson also make appearances. Rasula draws this diverse group of poets together, uncovering how the past is a "compost" fertilizing the present. He looks at the heritage of ancient lore and the legacy of modern history and colonial violence as factors contributing to ecological imperatives in modern poetry.
This Compost restores the dialogue between poetic language and the geophysical, biological realm of nature that so much postmodern discourse has sought to silence. It is a fully developed, carefully argued book that deals with an underrepresented element in modern American culture, where the natural world and those who write about it have been greatly neglected in contemporary literary history and theory.
Table of Contents
- Title page copyright page
- pp. i-viii
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xv-xviii
- Introduction
- pp. 1-10
- The library
- pp. 13-19
- Generation
- pp. 20-22
- The tropics, & the trope
- pp. 23-27
- Vomito cogito
- pp. 33-37
- The archaic and the old lore
- pp. 43-47
- Indian skin
- pp. 48-50
- On the extremest verge
- pp. 51-56
- The rim, the sediment
- pp. 57-63
- Necropoetics
- pp. 64-68
- Muses' archetext
- pp. 69-75
- A skin of mouths
- pp. 76-82
- The vessel
- pp. 83-90
- From Saturn to Demeter
- pp. 97-99
- Milk light
- pp. 100-105
- The floor of the upside down
- pp. 106-111
- The starry horizon
- pp. 112-119
- The frozen being
- pp. 120-122
- Memoranda and signatures
- pp. 125-129
- Proprioception
- pp. 130-134
- Characters
- pp. 138-140
- Language obeyed
- pp. 141-144
- Pestilence
- pp. 145-148
- De rerum natura: epic's lyric absolute
- pp. 149-158
- Ghosts of inner ecology
- pp. 159-164
- Detritus pathways
- pp. 172-176
- Scruples & superstition
- pp. 177-178
- Superfluity
- pp. 182-185
- The empty house
- pp. 186-187
- The times promised
- pp. 188-192
- The uninterrupted tissue
- pp. 193-200
- Bibliography
- pp. 223-236
- Biographical Glossary
- pp. 237-248