Remainders

American Poetry at Nature's End

Margaret Ronda

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503604896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A literary history of the Great Acceleration, Remainders examines an archive of postwar American poetry that reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis. These poems portray various forms of remainders—from obsolescent goods and waste products to atmospheric pollution and melting glaciers—that convey the ecological consequences of global economic development. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, Margaret Ronda highlights the ways that poetry explores other dimensions of ecological relationships. The poems she considers engage in more ambivalent ways with the problem of human agency and the limits of individual perception, and they are attuned to the melancholic and damaging aspects of environmental existence in a time of generalized crisis. Her method, which emphasizes the material histories and uneven effects of capitalist development, models a unique critical approach to understanding the causes and conditions of ongoing biospheric catastrophe.

1

North Central, South Side

Postwar Ecologies in Niedecker and Brooks

Various notable environmental histories, such as Adam Rome’s Bulldozer in the Countryside and Christopher Sellers’s Crabgrass Crucible, have drawn attention to the suburbs as key to understanding ecological change and the rise of environmentalism in the United States after World War II. According to these studies, the “homebuilding story” of the suburbs offers a direct window into the dynamics of consumerism, growth, and innovation in the postwar period as they bear on the nonhuman environment.¹ This framework enables us to see the way the newfound prosperity of the American middle class and the shifting demographics of the metropolis in the 1950s came into direct conflict with a conservation ethos—a conflict dramatically captured in the iconic image of the bulldozer plowing the countryside for suburban development.² In turn, this conflict produced new environmental responses, turning the suburbs into a central site for the rise of the postwar environmentalist movement.³

This chapter points to poetic evocations of other locales—the rural byway, the urban inner city—that provide alternate illustrations of postwar socioecological dynamics. While the suburbs present an essential means of understanding the shift in the late 1950s and early 1960s from conservationism to a more systemic definition of environmental crisis, they also orient attention toward the most visible figures—middle-class consumers, property owners, developers, politicians—and their associated frameworks of law, property, and economic growth. Environmental perspectives that foreground the suburbs remain attuned, in other words, to the ways empowered beneficiaries of postwar expansion came to recognize the unexpected environmental impacts of their own consumption habits.

By contrast, Lorine Niedecker’s and Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry highlights peripheral areas and residual perspectives that illuminate the underside of this era’s accelerating economic expansion. In their evocations of the monocultures of Wisconsin fields, the strange blooms in the Rock River, and the vacant lots and crumbling infrastructure of South Side Chicago, these poems convey the essentially uneven geography of capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than drawing attention to areas of growth and prosperity, these poets attend to what is torn down, cast off, left over, and to what might outlast. They reveal how complex dynamics of transience and endurance might be apprehensible by exploring the changing conditions of areas not typically recognized as environmental fronts.

In turn, the work of Niedecker and Brooks points to other ways of understanding place as a framework for environmental thought. In her Sense of Place, Sense of Planet, critic Ursula Heise has argued that ecocritical arguments that explore literary representations of place have tended to foreground aspects like “spatial closeness, cognitive understanding, emotional attachment, and an ethic of responsibility and ‘care.’”⁴ For Heise and others, ecocritics’ focus on the local often amounts to a refusal to confront wider historical forces, and this ethos of connectedness and stability can obscure other affective dimensions. I read Niedecker and Brooks, by contrast, not as advocates of place but as chroniclers of socioecological transformation as it emerges in these midwestern sites. This chapter considers how the condensed surfaces of their poems unfold the traces of environmental crisis discernible in the rocks, soil, fields, rivers, and waste of the Wisconsin countryside and the South Side’s racially stratified urban sites. These writers examine the often ambivalent, detached, or even negative responses that such locales generate for their inhabitants, and they reveal the ways an ethos of environmental care can be connected to material privilege or overriden by profit motives. If there is a stubborn affection that emerges for North Central and South Side in these works, it arises through representations of these places’ ongoing transformations and the ways their dwellers cope with and adapt to them.

Niedecker and Brooks explore these responses by way of forms that tend toward the minimal and the minor—the folk tale, the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, the regional vernacular, the ballad. These poems proceed by way of a rigorous minimalism that scrupulously attends to what is almost overlooked, the small phenomena and experiences that reveal larger ecological implications. They also demur from logics, social and poetic, that stress innovation and expansion, instead tarrying with what lingers and what is lost. Niedecker calls this dimension of her poetry the “element of folk time”—a measure of life imperfectly attuned to the dominant rhythms of midcentury American progress.⁵ Brooks evokes what grows in and amidst the crowded dwellings and vacant lots of urban Chicago. Through their attention to remaindered forms, times, and lifeworlds, these poets unfold an unsettling record of socioecological change at the dawn of the Great Acceleration.

Land Histories, Agrarian Presents

Niedecker’s life story has led to persistent interpretations of her poetry as lyricized evocations of natural surroundings from a perspective of isolated intimacy. Her first major posthumous collection, The Granite Pail, edited by the poet Cid Corman, was key in the construction of this image of Niedecker’s work. This edition influenced a generation of Niedecker critics to see her work through a lyricized lens.⁶ In his preface, Corman emphasizes the way Niedecker “melds language and nature,” especially the watery landscape around her home.⁷ Recent Niedecker scholars have strenuously objected to her characterization as a lyric nature poet by asserting that it neglects the formal originality and multifaceted regionalism of her poems. Such critical readings frame her instead as purveyor of avant-garde poetic experiments and draw attention to her multifaceted environmental portraits and political commitments.⁸

Here, I read Niedecker as a poet of the residual, attentive in both form and theme to what is left behind and what lasts.⁹ Through this perspective, Niedecker emphasizes the mutual determination of the natural and historical, tracing a natural history of anthropogenic forces imprinted in various forms of matter discoverable in this rural area of Wisconsin.¹⁰ Her early poetry, including New Goose (1946) and For Paul and Other Poems (1956), surveys local land history across various permutations: settlement, dispossession, industrializing agriculture, and ecosystemic simplification. These works depict the development of this area as a rural region, both dependent on and increasingly distinct from urban areas (Madison and especially Chicago).¹¹ In so doing, these poems chronicle a larger American story of the changing fate of agrarianism and the rural under an increasingly unified capitalist market, in and through natural-historical images of apples, corn, strawberries, and other crops as bearers of this change. These entities may appear natural to the untrained eye, but Niedecker scrutinizes them as emblems of a history of frontier settlement and land domestication. In the early 1960s, through images of trash and flood, she begins to track the intensifying changes to water, soil, and landscape that are affecting her area. Her later work, especially North Central (1968), grapples with the dimensions of nuclear capacity as it threatens earth systems at a newfound scale, placing this threat of total annihilation against smaller scales of anthropogenic change. Through such portrayals, Niedecker refuses a view of her rural landscape as unmediated nature, instead approaching it as what her contemporary and fellow Wisconsinite, ecologist Aldo Leopold, calls a “historical library.”¹²

Particularly in New Goose and her other early unpublished work, Niedecker plays with ballads and folk forms, often in truncated or experimental ways, to convey the textures of rural lives and to reengage American legends and history.¹³ With their subtle irony and folksy poignancy, these works make palpable what was lost—above all, with regard to Native American lives and lifeworlds—and the material changes to the land that come to seem natural in their absence.¹⁴ One of Niedecker’s untitled poems, written in 1945, retells the story of Johnny Appleseed with decided skepticism:

When Johnny (Chapman) Appleseed

came to a place he didn’t like

he covered it with apple trees.

He was the early American apple

who changed the earth by dropping seeds.¹⁵

The American legend of Johnny Appleseed, about a man who planted apple orchards across the Midwest, is usually told as a story about one man’s harmony with nature and the generosity of his actions. Niedecker’s critical vantage suggests, instead, that Chapman’s actions stem from a distaste for a particular place—“a place he didn’t like”—and a willful desire to remake it according to his own imperatives. Niedecker gestures, in an understated way, to the arrogance of Chapman’s dissatisfaction with what he sees around him. A linguistic link between Chapman and the “apple,” Niedecker argues, must reveal how Chapman has harnessed the apple to his will rather than simply asserting a harmonious union between them, as his sobriquet “Appleseed” does. Subtly demythologizing this folk hero who stands for a virtuous American land history in favor of a more critical perspective, Niedecker revises the folk framework from within to offer a different version of an old story through the small detail of the apple seed and the ironic deflation of Appleseed’s iconic piety.¹⁶ Above all, her poem holds open a space for imagining what was there before Chapman, how the “place he didn’t like” might have looked in place of the monoculture of apple orchards.

Other pieces in New Goose more directly confront the history of the violent expropriation of land from Native Americans, approaching these pasts as the literal grounds of the present.¹⁷ A poem from this collection, “Pioneers,” depicts the frontier process through the figure of Anson Dart, one of the early settlers of Green Lake County in Wisconsin.¹⁸ The first stanza reads:

Anson Dart pierced the forest,

fell upon wild strawberries.

Frosts, fires, land speculation, comet.

Corn to be planted.

How to keep the strawberries?—

Indians’ sugar full of dirt.

How to keep the earth.¹⁹

Dart’s very name underscores his appropriation of the forest that he “pierces” to discover its secrets. His acquisitive desire expands from the immediate preservation of the strawberries to a more generalized desire to possess the land. “How to keep the earth” emerges as the key preoccupation of white settlers such as Dart, who under the abstract auspices of property rights dispossess the native Winnebago (who “keep the earth” in fundamentally different ways).²⁰ At the same time, this idea emerges as a logic of improvement that favors particular species and reorganizes an ecosystem so as to “keep” them. As such desired entities, the wild strawberries and corn become emblems of a violent history of colonization and an abstract, acquisitive view of land. This point is underscored by the next stanza, which describes the government’s theft of the Winnebago’s land through deceptive treaties forced on them by “agency men” such as Dart.

“Red wheels gave the earth a new turn,” Niedecker writes in a subsequent stanza, invoking a classically georgic image of the e...