This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Cinders

28 T H I S C O M P O S T and smears, the unauthored ground of erasures and geomorphic drift. Poetry is biodegradable thought, "the honey bearing chaos of high summer." Conrad's Kurtz in Heart of Darkness hears the voices of the muses whisper out of that tropic he has come to master; "But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantasticinvasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core." Kurtz is no poet, so he can't live with that hollowness. But poets know that such a cavity can be a drum for sounding rhythm, a ham bone or basin to catch the Muse's thunder as it lets down "gigantic quavers of its voice." The hollowis not only the life ofthe poet, but can even endure domestication: the comedian as the letter C is a recomposition (by phonemic transference) of Kurtz (though not going sofar asto include that Old World "K" ofKafka's golem-haunted imagination): Kurtz asCrispin, a"connoisseur ofelemental fate" whose poetic destiny is to domesticate the great solitude with a fund of tropisms. Crispin's "blissful liaison, / Between himself and his environment" becomes as well Stevens's own mock rehearsal for his lifework, which was(combining Milton with Mallarme) to make the world into the final poem, to render all the world's significationstropological . That this is also the propensity of market economy is worth noting; but the gold standard or any other model of currency exchange legislates a specific model, the heliotropism which Derrida charts in philosophical rhetoric in "White Mythology," and which persists in the idealist alliance of king-phallus-capitallogos . Stevens, on the other hand, like Dickinson before him, openly toys with the posturings of idealism by absorbing the materialist priorities of a composting dispensation into a ground of thought where the reality will not be mutilated by the report. "The plum survives its poems"; and "The wheel survives the myths. / The fire eyein the clouds survives the gods." "The wheel, the lever, the incline, / May survive, and perhaps, / The alphabet." Cinders Gradual adjustment to the rugged sylvan dimension of a New World enabled settlers to rejoice in the "bee-loud glade"; but for the natives, the sound of the bees had a more ominous connotation. C I N D E R S 29 ... the movement of men wasto the west, as the slow advance ofbees through the woods meant to the Indians in a year, an axe would be heard. Each coffin hollowed out as a canoe.Each set backwards on a river, underground. It has not much been told from the perspective ofthose who suffered first epidemic and then actual invasion—the microbial assault that spread far more rapidly and pervasively than their human hosts.* For some, like Susan Howe, reflecting on early colonial history,"In the machinery ofinjustice / mywhole being isVision"— where Vision is the "understory of anotherword." The understory expanded from microbial to colonial agents, culminating in the state-sanctioned exterminating vendetta of "relocation" to which tribes like the Apache were subjected after the Civil War.Ed Dorn tellingly writes, They were sentenced to observe the destruction of their World The revolutionary implications are interesting They embody a state which our still encircled world looks toward from the past. Wherever we find that "the share of language is a yearning," in Kenneth Irby's words, America is at hand with its abrasive testimony. * The precontact population of North and South America combined is estimated to have been between seventy-five and ahundred million people, ofwhom 95 percent succumbed to diseases transmitted by the European invaders (Stannard, 268).For a multifaceted account of these "virgin soil epidemics," see Alfred W Crosby, Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History. 3 0 T H I S C O M P O S T How long did it last, that Paradise? never longer than it took those French to travel North along the coast to Maine April to May 1524—the open welcome of the New World •willingness all eager to embrace took one toke from those who only wanted to go East for riches...