This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

The archaic and the old lore

T H E A R C H A I C A N D T H E O L D L O R E 4 3 The post-human—the posthumous Homo Sapien—passes from cosmos to chaos. But chaos has always been with us, intrinsic to cosmos if not to cosmology (words about the world). The subterranean transmissions of composting poetry have been compacted in the compost library, where biodegradable thinking occurs , where we can conceivably speak of an "ecology of consciousness" in which psyche wandering is in touch with human boundaries, noting the logos that forestalls the corruption of cosmos by chaos. Chaos, now, may be nothing other than business "asusual" in assuming reflection to be simply that which glitters.* But for the proportionate intelligence, seeking ratio or the metrical ingenuity ofevents, "Wisdom is whole:the knowledge of how things are plotted in their courses by all other things" (Heraclitus, Davenport translation, 31). The Indo-European root of chaos (and of chasm) is ghi,meaning "open wide." When Duncan writes of "opening the field," following Olson's propositions of composition by field in a continuum of open forms, chaos is the opening. The aperture and its fathom. The archaicand the old lore In Gnomonology—a primer of poetics and practical wisdom—Howard McCord speaks of the need "to SHAPE expression beyond the bleating self." "You would know the whole?" he asks, and amidst his bibliocentric cartography urges a path "Through the force of love, by the heart's blind eye, in the swiftness of glimpsed forms, in lightness, in balance." McCord's references range widely, including * One poet who has made a conspicuous shift from verse formalism to a more open field practice—-Jorie Graham—speaks of the need to incorporate chaos as an ethical stance. "No genuine form occurs without the honest presence of chaos (however potentially) in the work," she writes, reflecting on her growing awareness that "poems, by the implications of their formal characteristics, were providing a metaphysical view of the world which might be a terrible illusion, one which might, moreover, be permitting us to not take certain kinds of actions because we feel ultimately, as a species, safe, compelled me to try to break that illusion as often as I could. Mostly to make myself feel how often I wanted to restore that illusion." At issue, then, "is the distinction between suffering and understanding, and how we want to merge them in the act of writing a poem. We want to be able to suffer the poem so that the actions that we take in the act of writing are true actions"—because "poems are enactments, ritualistic enactments—fractal enactments—in language,ofhistorical motions. And in the process of them, you experience your accountability" (Gardner, 227, 220, 226, 221). 4 4 T H I S C O M P O S T works like Ron Linton's Terracide, the plant lore of Oakes Ames and Edgar Anderson , Yi-Fu Tuan's The Hydrologic Cycle and the Wisdom of God, Adolf Portmann's AnimalFormsandPatterns, and a richly synthesized compilation of similar resources. Many of the coordinates continue to compel tactics of poetic attention, including Spencer Brown on "the membrane, the border" (in Laws of Form), Rene Thorn's probing into catastrophe theory (Topological Models in Biology), Marcel Griaule's Dogon cosmology (Conversations with Ogotemmeli), Henry Corbin's Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, biologist C. H. Waddington's concept of the chreod (meaning "pathway of change"), and Michel Foucault's (then just published) The Order of Things. Vital evidence of a poetic eclecticism, and native savvy of the compost library. Charles Olson provoked such cartographic study guides with "Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn." Elsewhere he proposes seven "hinges of civilization to be put back on the door" (Additional Prose, 25—26). These include the valuation of "a more primal consequent art & life than that which followed" to consist of the full Semitic prebiblical lore, an accounting of the roots of fifth-century Athens backin its earlier Asiatic connections (recognizing Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Buddha,and Confucius as contemporaries), and several other "hinges."* Another in this milieu of bibliographic provocations is Gerrit Lansing's manifesto "The Burden of Set" with its resounding declaration: "It remains to be seen what cannot be permitted " (92).The function of the trickster, that intrepid avatar of the impermissible, "is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixedbounds of what is permitted, an experience of what...