CAN POETRY SAVE THE EARTH? 357pushcart market where a “crate of lemons discharges light like a battery,” Wal-
cott ’s Paris “along the Seine / an oceanic surging in the trees,” Allen Ginsberg’s
sunflower “poised against... smut and smog and smoke.”
Poised—that ’s the point. Bitter or joyous, honest poetry will poise nature
along with society, wilderness with civilization, nonhuman with human. Sepa-
rate them, and damage in both realms becomes likelier.
How then to find a way of living on earth? Our animal bodies are “of the
earth, earthy,” as the Good Book says, yet in experiencing nonhuman nature
we don’t truly know it. We sense but can’t really grasp stone or tree, let alone
stream or bird. Still, at times, the saving grace of attentiveness, and the way
poems hold things still for a moment, make us mindful of fragile resilient life.
Poems have been doing this since well before environmentalism became a
watchword. In fact, the tradition enables what came later. To muse over our
place on this planet, we can always recall the Book of Job’s rolling cadences for
“rain... on the wilderness, wherein there is no man.” In their heads, today’s
poets hear Coleridge and Clare, Whitman and Dickinson, Frost and Williams,
Jeffers and Bishop, Stafford and Levertov, and on through Gary Snyder. These
presences back up more recent figures, such as Scott Momaday and Wendell
Berry, Mary Oliver and William Heyen, Pattiann Rogers and Alice Walker, Les
Murray, Homero Aridjis, and Don McKay, Simon Ortiz and Joseph Bruchac,
Linda Hogan, James Welch, Bob Hass, Alison Deming, John Daniel, among
many others.
Like many of us, contemporary poets want to survive in touch with things
without harming them. Scott Momaday, of Kiowa origin, touches the nerve
and verve of earth in his verbs: “the earth glitters... the sky glistens with
rain... eagles / hie and / hover” within an indigenous Creation poem he calls
“New World,” reclaiming that word “new” from Columbus. In midnight fear
of the Vietnam war, Wendell Berry has to “go and lie down where the wood
drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. / I come into
the peace of wild things.”
Emily Dickinson told a friend, “Earth’s most graphic transaction is placed
within a syllable.” Earth’s transaction, she said, and it ’s ours too, happening
within a human syllable. We can have it both ways, like the Yokuts shaman’s
prayer: “My words are tied in one / With the great mountains.. .”
Can poetry save the earth? For sure, person by person, our earthly challenge
hangs on the sense and spirit that poems can awaken.