Modern American Poetry

(^440) Bonnie Costello
William Cronon has documented in “The Trouble with Wilderness.” But
the poet can evoke a recalcitrant reality through various frames and
signposts, one that subsumes us in its power and exceeds our knowledge in
its “capacity for fact.” Its “neatness of finish” defies the finish of any pictorial
frame. The glacier and park at Mt. Rainier become emblematic of this
elusive reality, a bounded nature exhibiting nature’s boundlessness. The
poem is constructed out of quotations from the park manual, along with a
wide variety of sources including the London Illustrated News(sea world),
Baxter’s Saints’ Everlasting(spiritual world), and a conversation overheard at
the circus (social world). We may apply here Gertrude Stein’s remark about
the landscapes of America: “I like a view, but I like to put my back to it.”
Moore does not invite us to take the view of Mt. Rainier; it cannot be
“taken.” A site cannot be fixed as a sight. What the imagination can do is give
us something. Moore creates a distinctly textual reality in collage form that
provides an analogy (rather than a simulation) to the wilderness experience
it evokes, a rhetorical sublime to suggest a natural sublime. Reference to
language, and even self-reference, as well as pictorial representation, overlap.
The diagrammatic reality, the “glassy octopus symmetrically pointed,” turns
into a fearful symmetry which “receives one under winds that tear the snow
to bits / and hurl it like a sandblast / sheering off twigs and loose bark from
the trees ... is ‘tree’ the word for these things / flat on the ground like veins?”
The attention to flatness again functions doubly here: to challenge our
notion of the relation of the word “tree” with its vertical association to this
austere, faceted reality, this incredible height that flattens all other features;
and also to remind us that our own “smooth” “flat” maps are not the textured
reality they point to. This octopus knocks the map out of our hands, and the
trees themselves, “flattened mats of branches shrunk in trying to escape,” are
a little like our own feeble efforts to escape nature’s magnitude by mapping
it. Put another way, we may try to flatten, or map, Mt. Rainier, but in fact it
flattens all our efforts. The sense that we have turned Mt. Rainier into a
theme park for “those who lived in hotels but who now live in camps—who
prefer to” contends with the image that we and our maps are just part of the
fauna of the place.
Man’s will to map the world by coordinating it to his own body, Moore
emphasizes, finds its match in nature’s power to deceive. The glacier dotted
with flowers looks like the “pseudo-podia” of the cephalopod, which is itself
footlike only to bipeds. And we don’t even seem to know our hands from our
feet. The “Goat’s Mirror ... that ladyfingerlike depression in the shape of the
left human foot” (italics mine) “prejudices you in favor of itself before you
have had time to see the others.” The maps we make send us in circles: