Earth Song Book Club: Force of Nature

Force of Nature Poems

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

– William Wordsworth, “The World Is too Much with Us”

So the Romantics and Transcendentalists went out into nature to become more awake to the— well, to the transcendent. The sublime. Sucking the marrow out of life and sounding barbaric yawps and all that. But now my students and I are moving into American Gothic in our classroom: more short stories, fewer meandering essays. My students breathe a sigh of relief at the relative ease of narrative, and I tell them nature is still an actor in these tales, but now it’s a force to be reckoned with — actively malevolent at worst (Washington Irving’s marvelously drawn miry swamps), an image of the innocence we can’t return to at best (Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne sitting achingly in the woods, pretending it’s possible to be together).

In Earth Song: a nature poems experience, we start with forces of nature right off the bat. At least, the strength of the tornado from which the employees and craft shoppers are sheltering in a storage closet should spark some sense of commonality, right? But no, the rain and the gales are nothing to the power of the bully mother to send our narrator back into the store beneath siren wails for more googly eyes. The Romantics were wrong; the quilters hide in JoAnn Fabric, intent on the narrow world of their own notions, not making eye contact despite the felt storm. The natural world and fear of its disasters have little power here against obstinate human nature to remain oblique within itself.

Tony Hoagland’s “Jet” follows, with men behaving like boys under (What a line!) a “Big sky river,” trying to get back to a more innocent joy — coming close, maybe, but ultimately, they

                … gaze into the night
As if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.

In Hoagland’s poem, nature un-natures itself: the crickets wired for sound as if appliances, firefly lights becoming computerized dots and dashes. There is a sense of loss. Rabindranath Tagore picks up the theme. His “mind was straying” on the day the lotus bloomed, so he “knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine.” I hear resonances of Wordsworth again: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— / Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” We are not paying attention, and we are paying for it within our communities, within our impoverished selves.

But if we’re lucky, we haven’t lost the urge to seek for the things of beauty nature offers. In the poem In my defense, there was a very dense fog, Will Willingham re-natures his vision, morphing the refracted headlight of a following car into the moon, “a welcome light.” Poet P.K. spies “a torn old abandoned chair / on a dark cold rainy September afternoon / on a lightless highway” and concludes with a melancholy hope that “there exists such a soul” as would take such a seat in such a place, only “he, or she, is” / not here / not now.” But he, or she, exists, I infer, and will sit there some time, at the intersection of the mucky road and the chance to see and experience something that matters.

It’s a relief when, midway through this grouping of poems, Emily Pauline Jackson takes a steady look at the sky, the sun, the lizard, the lagoon — no human pollution in these lines — in the gorgeously rhyming couplets (rhythm and meter = balance is restored?) of “Marshlands.” On the other hand, Jan Kaus cannot unsee the unbeautiful “plastic cups … sprouting on the beach” in “Matsiranna,” but, relievedly, the detritus “did not affect the feeling that voluntary solitude is still possible for a while longer.” If Wordsworth were a high-fiving fellow, I think there’d be some hand-slapping at this.

Look, most of us can’t go out in the woods on our own for two solitary, nature-drenched years like Thoreau; maybe most of us wouldn’t want to. But we can stand like L.L. Barkat’s Old German Woman on the edge of any river, filthy as it might be, waiting to see the black-capped chickadees fly. Because nature, even as our uglier modern ways rub up against it, remains, and like Claude McKay, who knew the ache and hurt of the world, we can say, “I shall return, I shall return again, / To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.”

One last thing. When I traveled in England this past summer, I found myself stuck one day, alone. Due to an unhappy convergence of poor planning and overwhelmedness and the wrong kind of credit card, I was trapped in London for several hours, unable to flee to Oxford, my intended destination. I begged a free ride from a bus driver (thankfully he was not so engrossed by the metaphorical stacks of quilting fabric in his lap that he couldn’t see me in my need) and ended up on the cusp of a small, city-center park. Walking under the trees, I breathed down panic at my plight; I told myself I’d get out somehow and sat for a minute. I thumbed to my bookmark in Earth Song and read the lines in Jennifer Elise Foerster’s “Leaving Tulsa”:

Grandma potted a cedar sapling
I could take on the road for luck.
She used the bark for heart lesions
doctors couldn’t explain.
To her they were maps, traces of home,
the Milky Way, where she’s going, she said.

I sat beneath the London trees, and for a few moments in that stretch of desolate hours, when thoughts of maps that would get me where I was going loomed large for me, I was lifted out of myself. I remembered that there are farther places I’m going, my own Milky Ways beyond this England trip and beyond, even, the humdrum of my daily life back home. I confess I felt my heart and mind cracking under the pressure of figuring out how to get from a literal here to there without access to funds, the lesions of worry and panic – completely understandable. Good thing I’d taken poetry with me on the road. Good thing there were trees to sit beneath while I figured things out, helping me see beyond myself and my trouble for a moment. Good thing there are poems in the world, and nature even in the bleak places: very good things.

I have to leave off here, and I’ve missed a lot from this section, including:

The activated play of language in Richard Maxson’s Beefsteak.

The clever, clever fun of Will Willingham’s Poetry Slam.

The stunning images of “Dead River Road,” and what they say. (I think of Annie Dillard’s “beautiful bones” in her essay about weasels; ninety percent of my students’ jaws hit the floor at the notion of bones being beautiful, but ten percent, which means one or two, always get it.)

The mention of Willingham’s punch-of-a-poem Dam in Week One’s comments

Claude McKay, so often so raw and angry, culturally speaking (and rightfully so), wonder-eyed in memory of his homeland’s natural landscape in I Shall Return.

This stop-me-in-my-tracks line from Tony Hoagland’s Jet: “We are amazed how hurt we are. / We would give anything for what we have.”

Minor threads: rain, fog, roads

Discussion Time

We’re reading Earth Song: a nature poems experience together. Your turn. What stood out? (What did I miss?) Think along the same lines as last week:

• themes
• threads
• arrangement/effective pairings
• particular poems
• striking lines and rhymes

Buy Earth Song

Reading Schedule

September 7th p. 13-41 (“From the Editor” through “The Woodpile”)
September 14th p. 42-66 (“Tornado Warning/Joann Fabric & Craft” through “Scent”)
September 21st p. 67-95 (“I Pity the Garden” through “Home and the Homeless”)
September 28th p. 96-126 (“The Oak Desk” through “The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs”)

Photo byFalcon Photography, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Rebecca D. Martin.

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Rebecca D. Martin

Rebecca D. Martin's essays and poetry have been published variously and can be found here. Of all the places she’s lived, Asheville, North Carolina, feels most like home. She now lives in Central Virginia with her husband and two young daughters, where she writes poetry, essay, memoir, and YA fiction, teaches high school American Lit, and reads like she’s running out of time.

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