521 prompt #11, or "the healing power of nature/blank verse"

in response to this prompt…

John Ray Knott in his book Imagining Wild America writes, “many of Abbey’s descriptive passages [in Desert Solitare] suggest an effort to establish an intimacy with the place, something more like a lover’s relationship than that of observer to observed.” We might say that all of the authors we have read use description, narrative, and ritual to establish intimacy with the natural world. Describe a moment when you felt intimacy with the natural world.

a few peaces (three, to be exact)

I

talking can terraform, can flatten some tangled
topography of the mind into
flat verdance - you can see what’s coming miles
away; nothing jumps out, nobody screams
and even at night the shadows stretch
under the moon but you can see the tips of them.

not always, though. it’s all about what you choose to do with your bulldozer

II

the edge of the shore, water running into
and up and over pebbles pulling them back and
forth with that interminable but gentle grasp

fireflies at the edges of the scene, at the edges of my fingers
fighting off cold
darkness
indefinition
all at once
giving form to everything while also being cowed by it

the stars are cold
hard
bright
enough of the sky that you almost feel like you can grab them
but you wouldn’t want to

even the utmost beauty - perhaps especially
seems perilous to touch out here

i stretch out on the rocks
a million peas with a mattress hidden underneath
instead of the other way around

the view of the sky from this angle is obstructed by the spidery fingers
of a birch tree leaning out over the beach
from the closest green spot to the fringe
the edge
the fire’s light is almost invisible
but i can see the smoke skirling around the tips of my toes

immensity is always humbling, the
question is, really, what your response to the humbling is
it’s your only choice
i choose to see meaning, to believe there’s meaning above and beyond me
whether this is true or not, it doesn’t matter it keeps me from getting too carried away with
controlling

i don’t understand why people want to be on top, to win
it signifies an end to something, a stoppage of learning
a narrowing of possibilities

even worse a lot of the time it also signifies or requires
destruction
fear

not knowing together is better than knowing alone
it keep some of us from going crazy (maybe)…

it gives a purpose to…um…some of us who aren’t satisfied
with repetition
and winning socially-accepted accolades
(most especially money, but other things)
as an end to the means of life

if you’re interested in everything you never have to worry about being bored

of course, it also takes a lot of work
which most people aren’t into, and i guess i never understood that idea
if you’re constantly into doing as little as possible, you shouldn’t be surprised if your life
turns out to be a little less full than you might have wanted

it seems like a very straightforward karmic kind of thing
but so many people seem surprised when it happens

i guess that’s partly why i always try to be busy with something
even just in my own head - there’s just no time not to be

that’s why it’s good to be stretched out on the beach
in the middle of nowhere
in a place where some essential, elemental meaning
communicates itself to you whether you’re looking for it or not
for one, you don’t have to sift through layers of abstraction
and expectation to find it
it’s just right there

III
the moon’s loud enough that it’s night
but not night enough to sleep
the riverbed, long since abandoned by anything that could have given it
that name
lies
dappling the moonlight into a thousand shades
rose, for love (?)
pearl, for age
silver, for time
blue, for the sky
which is still blue even when it’s too dark to tell

521 prompt #12, or "further on down the road"

Brace yourselves for my potentially generic question…

How has this class changed your conception of man’s relationship to nature?

In more than a few significant ways, but I’ll try to narrow it down a bit:

Since my first backpacking trip nine or so years ago, I have harbored what I know now could best be described as a Romantic appreciation for nature. I have loved being in nature, I have loved writing about nature, and I have loved musing on nature when my day-to-day life has kept me within this or that city. One thing this class has done for me, though, is to show me that this at-a-distance appreciation isn’t enough. To treat nature as something to be kept at a distance, cradled and held aloft, is not only limiting, but in our current state of environmental crisis it is also irresponsible. Nature is not just a rarely-visited, sectioned-off old-growth forest in the middle of a National Park: it is instead part of our lives even in the hearts of our largest cities. Even in a sea of concrete, nature is vitally present through its very absence, through our need to acknowledge our place in the cycle of life and death. To fail to acknowledge this, I’m starting to think, is to miss the point.

For their part, the Romantic poets and other writers we have studied in this class are no longer abstract ideas to me. I no longer prize, say, Emerson simply because he said a few nice things about trees. There are ideas worth taking from Emerson, and there are flaws in his ideas that need to be addressed; the same could be said of any of the other authors we’ve read this semester. Whereas I previously saw anyone who had famously written on nature or the environment as a bit of a kindred spirit, now I see such revered members of the nature-writing canon somewhat similarly to various religious denominations: each has some things to offer me that are of interest, but I’m unlikely to ever set foot in any of their churches and put money in their offering plate again.

One thing that I am certainly interested in continuing to explore is the borderline between our contemporary perception of the idea of “nature” or “wilderness” and the urban spaces we so desperately insist on differentiating from these ideas. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of exploration of this differentiation in the readings we have done; indeed, it seems this is an issue that is just recently becoming en vogue, perhaps due to writers such as Edward Abbey, who problematize the idea that somehow glass, concrete, and cars insulate us from the natural world. When we die, do we not still return to the earth?

521 prompt #10

“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster,” so says Carson (277). Would she have revised her sentiment, surviving into the 21st century? Why, or why not? Pose a potential revision to this comment, based on your perception of our own attitudes toward the environment—such a hypothetical exercise need not harbor a cheerful outlook necessarily.

Progress is by no means easy, and I think in this lies the greatest threat to environmentalism: I believe Carson’s statement is actually less dire than the situation warrants. We are taught that we have attained our current understanding of the world, or current standard of living, our current lifestyle by forging ahead heroically against the current of chaos, entropy, barbarism. In our cultural imagination, we have reached high civilization (the type of civilization that can consume natural resources at a rate that threatens its own existence) through struggle, through war, through sacrifice. We have attained ease through a history of difficulty.

I wonder if convincing people to backpedal on this progress has thus been rendered impossible. It is analogous to asking a victorious army to give quarter to its enemy without any gain to itself.

Even if the end of our road is disaster (for us, if not the planet itself), it is difficult to convince people of the necessity of change when they aren’t directly threatened. Telling people that they are risking their great-great-grandchildren’s health means little to nothing to most, if they can live comfortably now. Since Carson’s time, we have become, as a culture, much more aware of our effect on the environment – at the same time, our effect on the environment has become more and more dramatic and destructive. People put recycling bins out on the curb, but they also create more trash than they did in the 1960s.

What we would need to not reach Carson’s prophesied doomsday is not a slowing-down of our idea of Progress, but instead a reversal of it. I don’t mean something as dramatic as going back to living in caves and hunting with sticks, but something that would require a massive cultural acknowledgment of our need to reestablish our place as a functional, and not simply destructive part of the natural ecosystem. We seem so far removed from such a position in America in the 21st century, that, unlike Edward Abbey, I cannot even begin to make suggestions as to how we would remedy this situation. It seems that our obsession with Progress can, at this point, only be given up by pitting our need to control against the ecosystem that first spawned us and as a result being made to realize how small we really are in the larger scheme of things.

This is all wonderfully bleak and world-ending-y, but perhaps Carson’s statement could be best reworded as: “The road we have long traveled has blinded us to the reality that we are not in fact our own masters, and our obstinacy on this point can only end in disaster”.

521 prompt #9

In your own words, what is Thoreau's view on man's relationship with nature? Can we see this philosophy in any of the Romantic poetry we've read in the class so far?

I’m perhaps a bit hung up on this, but I still find Julie’s visual model from her presentation on Muir most useful in illustrating a way to contextualize (and therefore, for me, to understand) Thoreau. In the presented triangular representation, Thoreau was located in the corner designated “Logos”, related to anthropocentrism, nature-as-observable object.

I hesitated a bit at first at this categorization: at first blush, Thoreau’s “Walking” had struck me as a manifesto that advocated nature-as-escapism. But in reality, this was more my own idea of The Walk intruding on what Thoreau was trying to say. His Walking is a response to civilization, to mad progress, to reckless industrialization, but it is a response that is still grounded in the same foundation of these more civilized pursuits.

What I mean to say is that Thoreau’s walk is indeed a walk of science; if it separates man from modern civilization, it is only geographically, not ideologically.

To me, it seems as if Thoreau sees nature as an eternally present, easily accessible balm for anyone who grows tired of civilization’s banal pursuits and needs a day away. Not unlike a Thomas Kinkade painting hung in a suburbanite’s living room, nature is a hobby, a distraction, a way to keep life from becoming one-dimensional. It is not, as we see in later nature writings, a resource to be appreciated, maintained, protected.

In this way Thoreau’s vision of nature is very similar to the Romantic view of nature in the sense that for him it is idealized; something to be admired, something to draw inspiration from. But not something that has a direct, real-world bearing on day-to-day life.

Though I would agree that some of Thoreau’s sentiments regarding nature are insightful and that some look especially nice on the back of a postcard with trees on the front, but his perspective on nature is more a privileged, removed perspective, and not the type of applied perspective that acknowledges nature and civilization as parts of a greater whole. This second type of perspective seems far more functional and useful in our own time.

521 prompt #8, or "l'epoque avant mes pieds"

Part One

[parts of a morning somewhere between november 2007 and march 2008, recalled mostly through the sense of hearing and the action of repetition]

the wind splatters against the living room window, wet with snow and angry; the door slams, barking against the frame, the lock grinds

three short flights of stairs down to the parking lot, each step on them made treacherous by a pastrami-layering of ice and snow, snow and ice

ice crunches

i remember when i could get my car out from underneath the snow. no chance of that now. if you follow my footprints from yesterday, still visible in the snow because only two other people have hazarded the walk to my apartment building in the last three or four days, they will take you out of the lot and down a hill that parallels grand avenue, which you can see to your left as you descend.

the amount of slush on the road makes it seem impossible that anyone could safely drive on it, yet occasionally one brave driver or another sissing of tires through slush takes their chances, travelling at low speed.

you have to walk on the balls of your feet while descending this hill; it's so sheeted over in ice that putting weight on your heels makes your feet immediately slip forward. walk carefully.

once you reach the blockbuster parking lot, you can see further ahead and the post-apocalyptic nature of the scene becomes clear: stadium way ascends ahead of you, visible only in blotches due to the sheeting snow.

crosswalk alarm beeps, like a bird that has no business being alive in this weather

i remember having to leave my truck, back when i had a truck, at the base of this hill for a week because there was so much ice on the road leading back up to my apartment that cars simply couldn't drive up it without sliding back down.

you proceed through the parking lot, the abrupt end of the crosswalk alarm leaving the proceedings in an eerie silence save for the near constant whistle of the wind

the next hill is worse. grab the handrail; you'll probably need it. unless you like the taste of ice and ground smacking you in the face. this sidewalk is ridiculous. no traction at all to be had.

splash of a gravel truck driving by to your left

proceed up stadium way until you get to b street. turn right. turn almost immediately left. usually crossing this street at this intersection is awkward at best, and dangerous at worst. this morning, with pullman in wasteland-mode, you tromp through snow almost as deep on the road as it is on the sidewalk. road crews have given up on the sideroads days ago. to your right, further up the b street hill, you see a girl in a red parka and blue jeans and red plastic boots go down, slipping on the ice and hitting with a nasty thud that you feel but don't hear. she gets back up immediately and continues; at this point in the winter falling on the ice is no longer a noteworthy event. continue along until you reach harvey street. instead of taking it turn right. then turn on c street. this looks imposing, i know. but c street is at this point easier to take than b street. trust me, i have bruises to prove it.

a car engine sputtering, trying to start in the cold. another already idling weakly. further up the hill you can hear the shrill screech of something that must be an improvised ice scraper rubbing against a frozen windshield. the sounds of winter morning near the university in pullman.

this is the hill i've climbed every day (with the rare exception when i go up b street) since i started working as a graduate student in pullman. i never had a reliable car, never had the money for a parking permit, never wanted to rely on public transportation, wanted to stay in shape. so i've gotten in the habit of walking. i can remember the sidewalk covered in piles of dirty gold leaves in autumn, peppered by sprouting patches of grass in spring, and shaded by the huge trees that fill yards in summer. this is the barometer, in a sense, with which i gauge the attitude of the natural world in pullman, the calendar with which i track the passing of the seasons.

the path snakes up and up ahead of you before curving off to your right. it seems slightly crazy that cars would drive up or down this hill in normal weather. this isn't normal weather, though. the ice is a little less of a problem on this hill, but the incline more than makes up for it. lifting your boots up and then plunging them back into nearly knee-deep snow as you ascend is draining, to say the least.

a crow caws from a lamp post above and behind you

as you climb, you can see people in full winter outdoor gear...inside their houses, squinting as they peer outside, expressions on their faces illustrating the decision they're currently obviously weighing: how important is that 8:10 class, anyway?

about halfway up the hill, the incline angle increases, and it starts to feel like the whole enterprise is worthless. your only choice though, is to keep going. wsu's campus is on a hill, and this is the least icy approach. you must keep climbing, or you'll die.

okay, you're not going to die.

a door creaks open behind you and to your left. booted footsteps stomp out onto a wood front porch. someone groans. possibly a death rattle.

crest the hill. pack yourself on the back (figuratively). it's all downhill from here.

foot traffic is suddenly visible as campus comes into view. many brightly colored dots with legs move against the near-solid background of snow and ice. bryan tower stands up against the wall of snowfall. it's still lit in the early morning, odd neon almost-pink like a surreal lighthouse. walk toward it.

from here it's a short jaunt along the sidewalk, past more red, orange, and yellow (why do people wear such bright clothes in the winter?) dots, and then along the left side of the hello walk

frozen trees branches scrape against your arm and backpack, a dry susurrus

and through the breezeway to safety. good work. be ready to do it again tonight, at 2am, on your way home to bed.

Part Two

"[One] of the things I enjoy about using various sound effects is how they carry their source time and place with them." (Cardiff 81)

The one thing I kept thinking about as I was writing this script was how the sounds communicated particular visuals. Most of the sounds I used are pretty typical walking-type sounds - the kinds of things you'd expect to hear on a walk in Pullman on any day, during any time of the year (with the exception of the snow sounds, of course). But the particular ways in which they were presented were intended to contextualize them in a specific empty/cold/winter sort of way. For instance, the door slamming and the lock turning sound differently against the background of a snowstorm than they do during, say, a sunny summer day. There are crows in the summer too, but somehow their cawing doesn't sound nearly as ominous. Envisioning these sounds in a certain way can help transport the reader visually to the particular environment in which the action takes place.

I also attempted to use the perhaps overly simple trick of lowercasing all of my language in the script so as to communicate a smaller, shrunken feeling to the action going on; as if the language itself was acknowledging the vastness of the environment it was taking place against by shrinking away.

521 prompt #7, "Stuff that might eventually become a thing".

Sitting in the parking lot of Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in the western corner of North Carolina, watching the horizontal rays of the westering sun slant through the beginnings of what would soon be a chill evening fog, Asheville suddenly seems like the kingdom of heaven. We – “we” being myself and my friends John and Andrea – had just finished a three-day backpacking trip in the nearby wilderness and then split up for a morning and afternoon to meet back in the heart of the Joyce Kilmer forest, John traveling on foot and Andrea and I by car. The bit of driving involved in moving the car from our original trailhead to the Joyce Kilmer trailhead – a bit of forest service road, a bit of one-lane, cliff-edge driving – was jarring, as usual.

Reincorporation into the “modern” world is always difficult for me after a few days in the wilderness, and the process is never more awkward than when it involves immediately taking a car out onto a heavily traveled road. Silence is suddenly sound, peace is suddenly conflict, beauty becomes artifice, freedom becomes a series of rules. Turning the key, starting the engine, hurrying to turn down the volume on the CD player as the guitar solo from “New Year’s Day” by U2 suddenly roars to life, I was envious of John’s extra few miles of hiking that would take him through the heart of the old-growth forest that Andrea and I were only now able to reach through a circuitous and disenchanting drive.

521 prompt #6, or "Ben's afraid of the dark and is a giant ninny".

Are any of the works we've encountered so far sublime? Or, if you prefer, have you encountered the sublime in nature or in popular culture? Discuss your experience with the work or natural phenomenon, drawing on Burke (and Longinus, too, if you like) to help out.

When I think of my experience with the sublime in terms of nature, I almost always think in terms of what I suppose Burke would categorize as Vastness, and possibly Infinity (through Vastness). One of the things that draws me to nature, both physically and as a topic for writing is its ability to suddenly and unexpectedly humble the observer, through size, through intricacy, through sheer (Burke again, I think) Power. One can encounter awe and amazement through the scope of nature without necessarily being terrified in a life-threatening sense, though I think the possibility of terror is what makes the experience of observing nature sublime in the first place. I suppose what I mean is that while simply observing a mountain, or a cliff, or the Grand Canyon doesn't necessarily put you in any immediate danger (this is especially true of sublime natural spaces that have been sufficiently tourist-ized), the very Vastness of these spaces can cause one to feel so dwarfed, so insignificant, that the resulting feeling of the triviality of the self can be just as terrifying as, say, the immediate possibility of plunging to one's death into the Grand Canyon might be.

My first night in the woods on a bona fide backpacking trip is a good example of what I'm trying (and perhaps failing) to explain. I had been camping many, many times before this trip, and so I was well accustomed (or so I thought) to the night, to the sounds of the woods, to other things that you would expect a first-time camper to perhaps react adversely to. It's also probably important to note that I was twenty years old on this trip.

We got to the trailhead early that day, and as I remember we hiked something like six or eight hours into the woods before calling a stop for the night, finding a spot to set up our camp just as the sun's rays were starting to slant noticeably. It was late fall, and so we estimated we had something like an hour or ninety minutes to get our business taken care of before seeing our hands in front of our faces became an impossible proposition. It was at this point, when we first stopped, that I became unreasonably terrified. There was a feeling, at least in my mind, that the oncoming darkness provided an non-negotiable barrier. Nighttime was something to be hidden from, something that would set upon us and, if we weren't fast enough, leave us stranded in a sort of unseeing stasis until the sun came up again.

I didn't know why I suddenly felt this way, and I hurried through setting up my tent and cooking dinner in somewhat of a panic. The last few steps of this process had to be done with the aid of a headlamp, which only exacerbated my terror. I spent most of the night curled up in my tent, jumping at every howl of wind, and every footfall of squirrel or deer outside.

In retrospect, this wasn't because I was afraid of direct physical harm, because, as I said, I'd been camping many times before and had gotten over my fear of "monsters" in the dark by the time I was about ten. It was instead because the night made the forest into something completely different, it made my world seem suddenly entirely too big and entirely too full of possibilities for me to conveniently deal with. We were miles from the relative safety of the car we had left at the trailhead, and in the dark, with little to no moonlight, were our headlamps to malfunction (a scenario I played out over and over again in my head), even those few miles would likely be unnavigable.

It was the immensity of the place, the immensity of the world that scared me, and the fact that at night in the woods that world didn't exist for the sake of my reassurance and support, as the world constructed by our cultural viewpoint generally does. I wanted some form of control, which wouldn't necessarily be possible again until the sun rose.

I have since grown to appreciate this feeling, this mini-terror (which, incidentally, I still feel an echo of everytime I'm in the woods at sunset) as a reminder, a useful way of centering my perspective on the world as opposed to centering it on myself as the world. I think that most (if not all) of my sublime experiences in nature spring from this. Seeing a mountain that seems too large to actually be there, seeing the sky spread out in near-infinite clearness hundreds of miles from any city lights; these are always slightly terrifying experiences for me. The first time I drove out to Pullman, cross-country on highway 70, about an hour across the Colorado border I got a glimpse of the Rockies for the first time, marching across the horizon like what I thought was a low line of thunderstorms. As we drew closer, my mind slowly realized that they must be mountains, but there was something terrifying in that, something in admitting that such a thing was possible that demanded that I feel a little smaller. And there's always some fear in admitting that, I think. Maybe that's what's at the heart of my sublime experience.

521 prompt #5, or "unfortunately my dreams are only like tripping on boring, boring acid."

In Christabel, there’s an interesting tension between things we see at night and things we see during the day. Christabel’s first reaction, after her night with Geraldine, is to brush it aside and deny the realities of her experience. Barcy’s night-time vision, by contrast, becomes the driving force of his character. Consider Coleridge’s exploration of the contrasting attitudes about the veracity of our dreams. Write about a particularly vivid dream you had. When you woke up, how did you react to that dream?

I thought this prompt would be especially interesting considering my somewhat troublesome relationship with sleeping. When I was really young, believe it or not, I actually slept too much. I had a tendency to sleep a lot at night and to still nod off during class (according to my parents, art class and fingerpainting especially had this effect on me). In fact, to hear them tell it, I constantly sort of stumbled around in this half-awake stupor, ready to sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Actually, that’s probably not much different than today, only then it was caused by an overabundance of sleep and now it’s caused by a lack of sleep.

On to dreams. I generally envy people who have the sort of dreams Barcy has. You know, the type you read about in books that are always vivid and clear and get turned into prophecy and metaphors for some universal truth. I wish I would have dreams like that. Well, unless I turned into the male equivalent of Cassandra. My hair is weird enough as it is without me tearing at it and screaming all the time.

I have a friend who has sleep paralysis and another who has lucid dreams. Hearing stories from them about their conditions always fascinates me. One of the main underlying causes (among other, weirder ones) of the insomnia I’ve had trouble with since I was about ten or twelve is that I always want to be doing something, writing something, working or thinking about something, and the idea that sleep could possibly reveal some meaningful or weighty experience is an alluring one for me. If I could have the kinds of vivid, realistic experiences these friends have in their dreams, I wonder if sleeping would be easier for me.

When I was younger (between the sleeping-too-much phase and the sleeping-too-little phase), I used to sleepwalk all the time. But I don’t remember it clearly at all. I would wake up to my parents telling me outlandish stories about how, the night before, I had come down to the living room in the middle of the night and had conversations with them, or made myself food to eat or something similar, but I wouldn’t remember it at all. I was also known during these episodes to speak in some bizarre tongue that only I (apparently) understood.

I also very occasionally have a very vivid, “real-life” type dream. Perhaps because of the rareness of these dreams, I tend to take them very seriously, in an almost mystical way. Usually if these kinds of dreams suggest some course of action to me, I’ll try to follow it in real life. I’m not exactly sure if that’s because I think the dreams are “true”, per se, or just because I like doing random things to make life interesting. Actually, I think it’s because when I have a “real” dream, it’s so real to me that sometimes I have a hard time even realizing it’s a dream. For example, when I was a kid I was obsessed with Super Nintendo (okay, and I still am). My favorite game at the time was Final Fantasy 2, and one night I had a vivid dream that I had gone downstairs to the living room and found the game on the coffee table, left as a gift by my parents. When I woke up, I hurried downstairs, feeling as if I had, in real life, just left the game there moments before. Of course it wasn’t there, but the dream had been so real I spent about three hours searching the house before I satisfied myself that the dream hadn’t actually happened. I’ve been known to this day to sometimes recall entire, detailed conversations to friends, or incidences I was involved in with them, thinking that these things actually occurred, only to be assured over and over again that I simply dreamed them.

This type of dream only happens to me maybe once or twice a year, though. I generally dream every night (or every other night), but my dreams are always just sounds, snatches of images, smells, blotches of color…sort of what you’d see if you could animate those drawings people did on LSD for those Army tests back in the 50s. A lot of the things I dream about are abstractly interesting, for sure, but as far as deriving real meaning from them? Doesn’t really happen.

I used to think people’s reactions to their dreams were dictated by their personality. One of my friends, who is a bit of a mystic, seems inclined through her personality to take things like dreams at face value as “messages for life”. My dad, who is a very pragmatic guy, would likely laugh this off as nonsense. But now I wonder if maybe the content of the dreams themselves are more to blame. I have a tendency to believe in fantastic things (if for no other reason than that they make life more interesting), but even I am leery of treating dreams as some kind of message from the astral plane. At the same time though, I have dreams that my brain inherently finds impossible to separate from waking reality. So that’s a bit of a problem.

I think there’s something inherent in nighttime, and the way in which it impedes vision (the sense, of course, that we put the most trust in) that makes us question our experiences and our perceptions. No matter how many lights we have, how many distractions, it only takes a few minutes in the middle of a dark forest at night to have us hearing and seeing things that aren’t there, and not hearing or seeing things that are. I honestly think that in terms of Christabel, Christabel knows full well what actually happened when she awakes in morning; she is just hoping that perhaps she is wrong, and that her experience with Geraldine might turn out to have been - or at least will be able to be explained away as - a figment of her imagination. For Barcy, who likely already has a bit of a bent towards the fantastic (as a bard), his dream gives him a purpose, gives his life a grand meaning…and who’s going to question that? It’s a good thing to have.

521 prompt #4, or “Not California”

For someone who has spent a decent amount of his grad school career critically examining the mythologization of the American West, I have to admit that ironically (and a bit shamefully) I bought into this very myth as a child and young adult. In fact, had I not, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

I grew up in northeast Ohio, in a disorienting, alienating patchwork of post-industrial wastelands, the bones of old strip malls, and the shiny, squeaky-clean illusion of suburban cul-de-sac communities. As is often the case, I experienced the side-effects of growing up in such a place before I was old enough to understand or critically examine the cause(s) of those effects. When it came time to choose a college for my undergraduate work, I was excited to get out, to move on. I didn’t yet know why I was excited. I was having the existential equivalent of the reaction of a bear caught in a bear trap: I didn’t know what had ahold of me or why. I just wanted to get away.

I had two main options. One was to attend the uber-liberal semi-erudite College of Wooster, which was somewhat outside my price range but which had an excellent program in English Literature and Creative Writing (two of my major possibilities at the time). The other was to attend the slate-grey urban sterility of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio. I was leaning at the time towards majoring in Computer Science and Case had one of the better local programs. Somehow, instead, I ended up enrolling at Kent State University. Forty-five minutes away from my hometown, it was still a geographic, demographic, and existential revolution for me. Partway into my first semester, the activities I engaged in in my spare time (of which there was admittedly little) had already changed from sitting at my computer playing video games to hiking in metroparks, going on road trips, attending free piano concerts at the music hall, reading things like Nietzsche just for fun, and riding my bike around town (as opposed to walking). It was a life-changing experience already, and I still had four and a half years to go.

After those four and a half years, and then two more years of working random blue-collar jobs to pay my rent, Kent hadn’t so much lost its charm as it and I had simply reached the limits of what our relationship could be. There wasn’t anything new for me there, and I’ve never been one to be content with simply being content.

Throughout my college career, spending time with a group of friends who enjoyed travel, I had cultivated a desire to “see the world”; of course, at that point in my life, anything beyond the borders of the US was - either financially or logistically - beyond my reach. So, as so many Americans did before and likely have done since, I turned to myth of the West. I decided I wanted to go to California. Partially for the sake of the trip itself, partially for the experience of living somewhere new, but mostly because of the culturally-produced idea that somehow, by traveling to the west coast one could be cleansed, transformed, allowed to have a second chance to find meaning in a world that seemed willing to sell it to you, but never willing to share it freely.

Because of my obligations to my studies (complicated thorougly by the fact that I changed my major to English late in my third year of classes), I wasn’t able to take off to California right away (though a few of my friends did). For years I kept the dream in the back of my mind, the one thing I truly wanted to do, once I had dealt with all of my responsibilities and was free to be reborn.

That chance came two years after my graduation when I received a TA offer from WSU. It was a school I knew nothing about in a place I knew nothing about. I was settled at the time in Kent, Ohio, with a TA offer to do Ph.D work at Kent State. I was renting a nice house. I had a fiancee who was living right down the street. My family was less than an hour drive away. But in spite of all of those things, I saw my chance to try the dream, and I knew that if I didn’t take that chance, whether it worked out or not, that I would regret it for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t recommend making a major life choice based on fear of potential self-loathing, but in this instance it was the best way for me to make the decision. I left for Pullman a few months later.

I still remember clearly arriving here on the first day. My disappointment in seeing the green forests of western Idaho fall away to present the desert-dry hills of the rolling Palouse. My realization that this, whatever it actually was, was not California. It wasn’t the dreamland of redwoods and acoustic guitars and sudden, inexplicable rebirth that I had imagined for all of those years. It was different than Ohio, sure, but if I was going to recreate myself I was definitely going to have to work for it.

So I did. And in so doing I acheived what I had hoped I would acheive simply by going to California - self re-definition, etc. - but I did so in a much less magical and much more engaged and rewarding way. What I found instead of a blank spot on the map to start my life over from was a town where everyone smiles and says hello, where you can drive an hour in any direction and find some of the most beautiful landscape in the country, and where I was forced to, for the first time, make my way completely on my own, completely away from anyone who would feel obligated emotionally, professionally, or financially to help me. And I think that was the experience that was mythologized into a much simpler, less intimidating version of itself.

theory of the arts, or “how i learned to stop hating that cliche phrase about loving the bomb and…no, that’s not true, i haven’t stopped hating it."

“With Blake, we’re presented with a dense theory of art and its relationship to the human creative vision. And Blake, for his part, seemed to create art with theory in mind. But can art grow legitimately out of theory, or must art be named and organized after its creation? Can we set out to create an art of vision?”

I’m not sure of the best way to attack this prompt, but there was something that drew me to it (aside from it being the shortest of the four). I suppose it’s because I consider myself an artist in a few senses, and so the question of what makes a legitimate foundation for the creation of art is something that’s on my mind fairly often.

I’ll ramble a bit here on my own thoughts before moving on to Blake.

I think that art comes from the personal experience/worldview/belief system/etc. of the artist who creates it. There is a common belief (at least in our current culture) about the supposed mysticism of artistic creation - an idea that art somehow springs into the world, fully formed, in a magical moment of sheer inspiration and brilliance. I think this makes the idea of applying theory, or indeed perhaps any structure at all, to the creative process distasteful to some and as much as inconceivable to others. Does the belief that this distaste is based on stand up to scrutiny, though? Not at all in my experience.

Whether it’s writing a seminar paper, doing a sketch, taking and editing photos, writing a poem, a story, a song, or a novel, I have never (with one or two notable exceptions) had the “sprung fully-formed” experience when attempting to create art in my life, and I have had variants on this conversation with other people of an artistic bent enough times that I can say there are at least twenty artists whose experience in creating echoes mine and zero (that I know of) who would contradict my claim. Art doesn’t magically happen. Songwriters don’t just create songs out of thin air. Well, unless they just inhale massive amounts of marijuana or cocaine and then strum on a guitar and sing or beat on a guitar and scream (respectively) until something vaguely coherent emerges. But I digress.

Art is work. It’s work based on what you’ve seen, smelled, felt, tasted, heard, loved, hated, dreamt, buried throughout your life. Whether you invoke this consciously or not while creating, I believe this is where the creating comes from. I know I’m taking a bit of wide view of the word “theory” in this regard - not everyone will deconstruct the entire history of poetry/art and its motivations before sitting down to write a poem - but I believe that at the heart of both Blake’s desire to base his poetry on theory and the generic artist’s desire to base his/her creation on his/her own filtered and interpreteted experience is the same larger aim: to give both some kind of form and an essential uniqueness to some level of what’s being created.

In Tuesday’s presentation, the thing that certainly caught my attention the most (other than making the awesome Blake plates) was Jim’s comment regarding Blake’s idea of how to reconcile desire/innocence within a world of law (ideally in such a way that doesn’t involve volcanoes and/or people blowing up): Blake suggests that one channel one’s desire into Work (with the implication being that the highest form of work is, of course, the creation of art). I like this idea a lot because of the way that it immediately characterizes artistic creation as work, the same as one might consider being a bank teller of a composition instructor to be work.

I think it may be possible to say that without this ability to conceive of artistic creation as work (versus, say, seeing it as frolicking under an oak tree with a chapbook until your Muse smacks you upside the head and you wake up with something publishable) and also without the desire to incorporate one’s own theories, experiences, etc. about life into their art, that there can’t be art. It isn’t the pretty words or the nice music that makes something art; it’s the person or people and the lives behind that creation, and if there isn’t any of that behind a creation, it’s going to fall pretty flat.

I just now thought of how, for the last few weeks and especially during orientation, a very popular piece of advice for incoming grad students was that they should write about and study what it is that they’re interested in, and not necessarily what seems the most professionally viable. So there seems to be an undercurrent of support for this idea (whether it’s conscious support or not) of generating your own hierarchy of what’s important, of what’s interesting, and using that to fuel your writing. So maybe creating with a theory in mind isn’t that outlandish of an idea after all.

521 prompt #2, or "'Kubla Khan' Would Be Cooler With Robots"

I’d like to focus on looking at Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Shelley’s “Ode To The West Wind” as examples of texts that fit Lawrence Buell’s description of “environmental texts”.

I was originally drawn to these two works specifically out of all of last week’s readings simply because they seemed to me to share a common theme in their acknowledgement of the circularity of natural processes. Now, Buell’s framework gives me a chance to see if they have a more detailed relationship.

Buell’s first requirement seems to be met by both poems. I’ve always at least halfway believed that within the torrent of beautiful imagery that is “Kubla Khan”, there’s a little bit of colonization going on. Maybe I’m just a pessmist or have started to go insane from grad school and now see colonization everywhere, but there’s always been a contrast for me between the natural world in the poem and the pleasure-dome that is incorporated by its builder fluidly - though not seamlessly - into that natural world. Even Coleridge’s desire to recreate the pleasure-dome shows, for me, a desire to put words to something that is essentially beyond words. It’s a desire I myself have had many a time as well, and I can understand it, but it’s still an attempt to quantify and/or enclose the unquantifiable. Maybe that’s the message meant by Coleridge’s inclusion of human history into natural history: a constant desire to explicate or control, even if the desire is simply to be able to celebrate nature…but there’s also an acknowledgment that such things are maybe a bit beyond our abilities.

In Shelley’s “Ode…”, human history is perhaps portrayed as slightly less aggressively. It is nature and nature alone, Shelley seems to be saying, that is capable of inspiring us to greatness. We are reliant on it, and he acknowledges this without any pretense of conquering, claiming, or building. Instead, he just begs nature to give him a hand.

Similarly, Buell’s second requirement is closely related to the first, but perhaps different enough to warrant a few more words. Human interest, even more significantly than not being “the only dominant interest” in both works, is displayed as secondary and subordinate to the interests of nature. Interestingly, human nature is also shown to be seemingly frustrated by this subordination.

The third requirement is the tricky one for me to draw a connection to, honestly. But I’ll try anyway. For all of Shelley’s and Coleridge’s insistence upon humanity’s subordination to the natural world, they seem to not be directly interested in implying our responsiblity towards the natural world. My guess is that this is because to them the natural world is so awesome, so powerful, that the idea of wringing your hands over whether you remembered to recycle your newspaper or not would seem silly, perhaps, in the mindset of these poems. That doesn’t mean that in the time between the writing of these poems and today, a time in which we have arguably developed technologies and lifestyles that are environmentally impactful enough to alter the natural processes that Shelley and Coleridge foreground in their poems, things haven’t changed. I think the lack of a direct ethical imperative in these poems is more a function of the time that Coleridge and Shelley lived in than anything else.

The fourth requirement on Buell’s list is actually the one, like I mentioned earlier, that caused me to choose these two poems in the first place. I think one of the absolute most fundamental points of both of these poems is the interest in nature as a cycle. In “Ode…”, the first three of the five stanzas, before Shelley goes off on urging nature to provide inspiration/sustenance/etc., speak clearly of the west wind, the “destroyer and preserver”, as the harbinger of autumn, the indicator that nature’s wheel has once again begun to turn from birth to death.

“Kubla Khan”’s relationship to nature-as-cycle is more based on imagery alone and is a little less obvious, but I think the connection can be seen by comparing the pseudo-sexual (and therefore spring/birth/etc. related) imagery seen through the poem with the mentions of the caves of ice and the “deep romantic chasm”, which is described as “a savage place” from which, actually, the life-giving fountain springs.

I think, taking into account the fact that in the ensuing years nature has become less awe-inspiring to a lot of us based on the fact that we can now “control” it, and therefore the idea also that we are responsible for its well-being has also grown, that both Shelley and Coleridge’s poems fit Buell’s requirements.

521 prompt #1, or "want to read poetry? buy a pennywhistle and a faun"

(for 521):

My first “real” experience with poetry was…traumatic, to say the least. It was my sophmore year of college, and so of course by that point in my academic career I had already sat through a pile of high school english classes in which we read, studied, discussed, and interpreted all manner of the poetry one typically reads in high school. We even at one point interpreted the lyrics of the first track off the Oasis record Be Here Now - which, incidentally, is a much less enjoyable album than What’s The Story (Morning Glory)? I also had an Honors English Colloquium my freshman year at Kent State University that involved reading mostly Wallace Stevens. So, I had thought I had a decent background in interpreting extremely inaccessible poetry when I entered my first Creative Writing class. I was wrong, of course, or else I wouldn’t be wasting your time with this anecdote.

The class was led by a local poet of some reknown and so, while we did our fair share of writing brief stories and dialogues and the like, we mostly focused on writing poetry. It wasn’t until I actually sat down and tried to write my first real poem - joke poems written about my high school teachers for the amusement of classmates didn’t count - that it became clear to me that there was an entirely different skeleton under the skin of poetry that I’d previously been taught to poke and prod.

So, my first point isn’t that if you’re looking for a good way to interpret poetry you should necessarily go sit under a tree for twelve hours and write blank verse about how it makes you feel and in so doing you’ll reach some kind of interpretational epiphany. My point is simply that there are two ends to a poem, and while it’s our job to focus largely on the reading end, wrapping your brain around the writing end is probably going to give a much more holistic and therefore effective view of the material you’re looking at. It’s no substitute for close reading, or for knowing every detail ever recorded about, say, Wordsworth’s life, but it’s a supplement.

I’m disinclined to lay out a step-by-step process through which everyone should read poetry and reap the maximum interpretational benefits; even in my compositon classes I am most comfortable with making suggestions as to how my students make necessary writing and thinking moves and then talking through with them the strategies that they themselves find most productive. So, secondly, instead of doing that, I’ll tell you how I read poetry and from there you can decide if there’s anything to take from that that’s helpful to you.

I read poetry in much the same way as I listen to music (I see a lot of parallels both in the composition of each and in how I personally view them both). When I get a new record, I sit down and listen to it passively the first time. Try doing the same thing when reading a poem. Read through it, definitely note (mentally) things of interest, illuminating turns of phrase, etc. but don’t stop to take notes or to wikipedia biographical details on the author. A lot of poetry, again like music, is very much about rhythm…even a good amount of the poetry that purports to eschew rhythm is still subject to it. Chopping up your reading while trying to mine nuggets of meaning is going to close you off from the natural experience of paying attention to rhythm. Though, naturally, if you’re reading something that runs for fifty pages, you’re not going to be able to hack through it all one sitting. Maybe in that case it’s best to pick a stopping point ahead of time and then take some notes at the end before starting the next section later.

In any case, once you’ve finished your read-through, take some notes. Often, following up on my music metaphor, after the first listen I’ll read some reviews of the album online, or read the liner notes and all the lyrics. With a poem, maybe go back and note certain sections that really jumped out at you, certain turns of phrase, certain places where it seems perhaps like the author is playing with rhythm, or form. The point of the first reading is so that you can gauge your intuitive response. This is where my aforementioned “write your own” strategy will likely pay off the most: though there’s a lot to be said for studying biography and history and meter and whatever else when it comes to poetry, often this instinctive first response is going to be informed most thoroughly by your own experience with the form of writing that you’re dealing with. So even if you’ve thrown down a few crappy poems once and nothing else, you’ll be able to empathize a bit more perhaps with the mode of expression you’re trying to interpret.

After the first reading, go back and look in-depth at the sections or lines or phrases that you thought were most engaging. Or that you thought were important-sounding. Often, to me, these things aren’t really the same thing. I’ll read a section of a poem and think “that’s a good way to describe light filtering through a canopy of trees” but ultimately I’m just drawn to that section because of pretty imagery, whereas a section that is seemingly clearly a reference to the poet’s redheaded mistress might not change the way you look at the world visually but it’s probably important in terms of author biography or history. I think each of these types of concerns are just as important to interpretation in their own way.

Gravitate towards the parts that interest you, for one reason or another and once you do some scholarly-research-type work with those sections, ideally the combination of your emotional reaction and empircal evidence will start to yield bits and pieces of a coherent reading. The important thing to realize is that poetry isn’t often immediately accessible in terms of an overall meaning, and may, at times, even intentionally attempt to foil such searches for clarity. Sort of climbing a cliff, you need to find your handholds, and lock onto them, and then go from there.

It’s important to remember, though, that how the poem makes you feel, how and where it strikes you, is just as important as any historical or consequential knowledge you can bring to it.