by E.J. McAdams & James Sherry
An idea for a form originates from another form. You could say, being alive means defending a form.
—Anne Tardos, Both Poems
In his “new,” read untethered, life, Dante’s Vita Nuova solidifies a hierarchy of poetry and criticism by placing the sonnet first followed by a prose description of how he wrote it, separating poetic and critical practice as definitively independent fields. While it was vital to free our imaginations from God and for Dante’s structure to mirror that separation in order for thinking to progress beyond the impacted structures of scholasticism, artists and scientists have now all but exhausted the independent value of analytic thinking and action isolated from the environment. Evidence is everywhere.
Our cul-de-sac of analytic culture must find a synthetic next step: Way as Scalapino said. In Exchanges of Earth & Sky (Exchanges), Jack Collom proposes a synthetic structure based on “&” that adds a tool to poetic form. How does he do it and how far does he take it? For as it is new, it leaves change as an achievable probability. And it would be new for readers to expect many interacting truths in poetry rather than a distilled, essential truth, and even those rare instances of essence might be proposed with less certainty.
Exchanges presents a series of poems about birds and people, each divided into two poems separated by [EM1] ampersands, usually in a one-page piece. The poem component above the &s consist of cut ups about birds. Then there’s another part: the line of ampersands (& & & & & &). The third part, or second poem component, registers something the poet does or thinks about. There are a lot of references and appropriations identified in the Acknowledgements. While birds and humans find themselves on different parts of the page and rarely change places, they are connected by &. As the &s are additive and recursive Collom’s structure sets up a complex set of assumptions. Let’s read above the &s first.
Collom’s idea of poem first juxtaposes one thing and another in a bird field; things adjoin and don’t necessarily interact. In the biosphere, on the other hand, some birds congregate together; we see sparrows with juncos, chickadees and nuthatches. Among larger birds, crows make room for jays. Smaller birds peck at the heads of fleeing red tails. None of this contact happens in Collom’s bird collages. Each bird is treated as an independent organism separated as in a bird book, not as in the field, so Collom’s poetic field nests very much within the book field. [EM2]
& Collom’s passages use language and poetic tactics as technology, a cut-up around birding. He keeps the reader’s interest by working around the group, by positioning rather than by overt argument. He does not convince, but collects and suggests the quotidian; not epiphany, but common speech, just as the best birding is in the parking lot. Neither does he select precious birds or precious language. The “Woodcock” is described as are most birds by their various names, parts, and feeding:
head large—neck short—eyes large and
set far back and high—bill very long and compressed—
the lower section shorter than the upper (p. 33)
While he often writes for effect, this bird field names and describes with a predilection for speech. Compare Collom’s approach to another bird collage series by Jonathan Skinner where the associative phonemes of the “Northern Parula” transform story and picture:
O Guadeloupe harelip
summer’s enough now
wrong head threwn about
not witholding thoughts
the tundra dream’s plosive (Jonathan Skinner, Warblers, Albion Books, 2010)
While Collom varies his style widely as we flit through the book, the plurality of the bird segments consists of descriptive, scientific appropriations. While he does evince the music in science,
blue peter, splatter, shuffler, pelick, pull-doo
slate color
each toe (p. 31),
pastiche of the bird book dominates his vocabulary. He sees the birds from a human, analytic point of view rather than the whole bird self. [EM3] [JS4] This abundance of similar poetic tactics seldom selects for other cognitive effects. The observing bird watcher doesn’t link the sounds and rhythms to thought as for example in this short poem from a manuscript Warblers by Jonathan Skinner:
Black‐and‐white
Mniotilta varia
scrapes on Lima
pointer’s down
on insect toes
flicks zebra barks
for juicies, icies
eye sees icy heat
sees large gunmetal
orca cleans
up shady shades
Neither does he extend the bird into other areas of the world and mind as for example in Evelyn Reilly’s Styrofoam:
Now for the past three months such a clattering and fragility in my head, the sounds of rushing rivers surrounded by little birds.
(discalced de-castled devotees.of
“the real world, I mean the real real world”
In.w/a rose.arose lichen with lovely.metallic.names
& plastic.plasticity (Roof Books, 2009, p. 28)
The possibilities of human and non-human interaction expand both human understanding and language technology in these examples. Collom’s focus on &, the synthetic structure, does little to reconceptualize the material above. And the reader quickly tires [EM5] [JS6] of his recitation of bird facts in spite of their clarity and precision and wishes to know more about herself. Collom’s poetry above the & clearly identifies a marginally connected world, but what does the bottom do?
The lower part of each poem represents the earth part of the exchange. Subjects are largely human, but some of the bird collages above the &s teeter on avian remarks below. Some of the cut ups of Birds of America above the &s sit solidly on what Marcella Durand in her Introduction calls “spandrels of human life.” Collom’s manual labor and references like “Speedy Dry,” which research reveals to be a commercial oil absorbent and also a brand of cat litter, reflect this tool-based use of language. Leave it to poets to make/infer the most out of little. [EM7]
Below the &s range diverse terra firma activities; he even has a poem about dinosaurs, acknowledging the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs:
who turned out the lights
the dinosaurs
their curlicues of dark movement
when they brush my shoulder before sunrise
and their breathing passes overhead (p. 72)
And poems below the &s link as “Goldfinch” “White-Crowned Sparrow,” and “Rose-Breasted Grosbeak” contain stanzas numbered consecutively across the three poems, but only below the &s, but also about other animals including us, mummies, and pears, but still only marginally connected to each other. There’s no happy horseshit about living in harmony; species are largely separate:
but knowing classical passages
is a mode of motion, which is
why they leave so
little extra force for
personal application. (p. 74)
And in these five lines perch another of Collom’s linkages that go against the grain of alternative poetries, a series of classical references “culled from sources I no longer know.” (“Acknowledgements”) There’s a refreshing, non-judgmental idealism in his writing persona in the writing that our more ideological contemporaries avoid in order to make their arguments. And it is precisely this linkage of poetry and criticism that Collom might have made.
Collom is then profoundly a labor poet. Like Philip Levine, Jack worked, but he’s not branding himself and remains as modest as he positions humanity modestly. Consistent ethics doesn’t make poetry better, but it makes it harder for people to say mean things about you behind your back. Nevertheless, Collom’s attractive American naiveté [EM8] will not change humanity’s reflection. Environmentalism needs to develop many skills to change many and varied selfish necessities. And even more cleverly we need to work with the survival instincts of that basic truth of biology: the individual organism. We must toil past our current saving-face ethics to a saving-our-ass ethics. The problem is quite complex, but Collom as an artist does stimulate a lot of these thoughts and issues with his simple structure; it’s one of the values of poetry.
Collom’s innocence does not insist on engagement at every point, but in connective absence the reader tends to wander as the mind’s default condition is wandering. Civilization suffers the same condition, and lack of leadership brings out our adaptive itinerancies: attention-deficit- disorder primitives were better fed than their focused cohorts, hence the power of parasitical libertarianism on the political landscape. And in a disintegrating or transitional world, the cutup, juxtaposed, unforced connections ring truer than many of our forced emotional responses. But even Collom sometimes reverts to sloganeering:
Within
The planet’s ecology, we’re like
A bomb in a bus (p. 56)
replacing a deeper understanding of the biosphere with this guilty simile. As we point out above, one of the most difficult issues for environmentalism will be to address how to modify the individual human organism’s drive to survive. [EM9] [JS10]
Collom’s book has three sections while each poem has three components, and in this second of three sections of the book, the ideas start to emerge. Collom replaces Dante’s hierarchy of poetry over criticism with a fixed structure in the sky and a fluid structure on the earth. In a two-page spread of the lower half of the poem that retains the encyclopedic structure of birds on top, Collom reproduces his calligraphy in two titles of two poems each with two columns.
THAT OUR SENSE OF BALANCE
TENDS TOWARD MERE SYMMETRY (p. 58)
is across the page spread from
THAT NATURE IS . . . ALMOST
EVERYTHING (p. 59)
Here Collom starts to tell us what he means by the three/two structure.
We see Nature as separate from us.
Our either-or gabble (conversation style)
doesn’t permit us to actively recognize subtle interpenetrations. (p. 58)
On this page the line reads across the caesura, as he points out human limitations. While across the spread on p. 59, asymmetrically, the poem reads down the first column, moves to the right, and then down again.
Nature is more obvious
in the jagged ghetto The very sidewalk
than in the suburbs—but the suburbs stinks
are larded with it of Nature; all (p. 59)
Multiple types of exchanges construct multiple sets of ideas about the relationship between humanity and the rest of the biosphere. While the sky reads like modern nature poetry, the earth varies and varies. So we come to the third component of the poetry, the line of &s. & connects words of the same order, sentences of different orders that exist side by side, isolated birds in the air and collages/collections/colleagues of ground engagement; biosphere fixed and variable. Analogic form draws a picture of our world. The analogy isn’t exact any more than the ideas are exact; diversity isn’t always the most productive model. In a deep analysis of diversity and productivity, and any new model will need to be productive to sustain a large human population, Vaclav Smil addresses this commandment of the environmentalism:
Perhaps the best foundation for assessing this controversy is to approach the problem from a large-scale empirical point of view. Waide et al. (1999) reviewed about 200 cases of published relationships between productivity and species richness and found that the link was unimodal in 30% of all cases, positively linear in 26%, negatively linear in 12%, and insignificant in 32%. Their review of the literature concerning deserts, boreal and tropical forests, lakes, and wetlands led them to conclude either that the existing data are insufficient for any conclusive resolution of the link between diversity and productivity or that both patterns and underlying mechanisms are varied and complex.
(The Earth’s Biosphere, The MIT Press, p. 227)
Diversity appears surprisingly productive; there is no univocal response. We cannot simply focus on sustainability, but need a productivity/sustainability model that handles short and long-term issues for survival and for thriving. But both poetry and politics do simplify to extend human understanding of our condition; here, however, we want to tell a more complete story.
While Collom adheres to form for the birds in the sky, he establishes a hierarchy dominated by land-based life forms due to their ability to adapt and break with form. (And he sometimes writes about birds in the earth segments, but then birds live on the ground, too.) The value of form as natural law adjusts in Exchanges to environmental needs. Implicitly & obliges the reader to evolve away from the fixed structure of the title that implies a set of bidirectional flows. Instead, as the form evolves, the reader understands how it reflects the complexity of existence rather than the narrow analytic paths humanism took to diverge from the past. Clarity is sacrificed for formal realism. [EM11]
In two ways, however, Collom undermines his ideas of linking birds and people. First, he separates the birds from people and rarely refers to humans in the bird realm while he might have focused on exchanges beyond birding. A defense might be mounted by suggesting that people by nature desire a fixed and simplified reality; it soothes us. Second, he uses the term nature to mean that which is not human while saying explicitly “Nature is almost everything.” (p. 59) Once he uses the word nature to distinguish humans from the rest of planetary forces as opposed to using nature to mean inherent characteristics, [EM12] his argument has difficult progressing because the language acts as an anchor; every move forward contains this backward-looking element. But we don’t think that would bother him much.
Subsequently he realizes that he has not been totally dedicated to his point in an essay in ecopoetics. “I hope to bring out processual resemblances between poetry and nature, to show the former as an odd child of the latter.” (ecopoetics no. 4/5, p. 5) His poetics reveals an intention not fully realized in the poetry but becomes very clear in the essay. He continues to use nature to distinguish human and non-human activity on the planet. He wants to see poetry as odd whereas his point might be phrased to show how poetry resembles nature.
In some ways this essay improves on his best effort in Exchanges to exchange. His essay’s “Glossary” with its one entry “truth” points out that at one level truth exists, at another level truth is relative, and at yet a third level truth does not exist. And he realizes that neither humanity nor any other species can rely on nature.
Nature’s too slow.
People get
bored. (p. 44)
Nevertheless, as much as environmental poetics can be defined as fully fungible to firmly break with the Dantean past, complex and variable species interaction must work with that one primary fact of biological structure: the status of the organism. While we may criticize the ego from the socialist or Buddhist perspective and even point out the interactivity of organisms with their parasites and commensals, organisms predominantly exist to exist and of course reproduce even in the interactive state. Any other driver would result in extinction. For evolution is punctuated not endless and may exterminate 90% of species any day now; our awareness of Collom’s multipart form with carbon paper connectors continues to be misrepresented by poets seeking to perpetuate their work, read organism.
At one point Collom seems to get it and then at another point he reverts to a totalizing principle. [EM13] He drifts away because it’s really hard to change a paradigm like Dante’s without trying to create another paradigm of the same type. “Ecology is relationality, hence endless. The only closures we can put on any ecological consideration are the ones that demonstrate the limits of a closed system – such as planetary water – or arbitrary cuttings off of thought. Such as this.” (ecopoetics no. 4/5, p. 7) While Collom opens up his form, his organism resists describing humanity and the rest of the biosphere as a single complex entity.
Then he redeems himself: “The two (ecology and Ding an sich) work together every inch of the way.” (ibid., p. 8) Closure like truth has many forms, and it is the multiplicity of form, both separate and linked, that enables continuity. Even when 90% of species go extinct, the processes remain in place and we’d have to try really hard to destroy them.
Exchanges, with its combination of fixed and fluid form, mimics the ecosystems we inhabit. “The purple grackle is a mere crystal.” While this review would be much tighter if we took a specific path through the book, we would not be telling you what this book is about if we didn’t point out how our dichotomous expectations are not realized to the credit of Jack Collom.
Read more on the authors here, here, here, and here.
Comments
[EM1] As they should, the ampersands challenge the distinctions we require as critics. The ampersands serve multiple functions including division into top/bottom or sky/earth while also acting as a cell wall, which creates a distinction between inside/outside but one that is semi-permeable. We will have to look at the parts but abandon them, too. Beyond classical logic, Collom’s structure seems to argue, lies the potential of a new logic, where A can be not-A. For example the cover of Exchanges suggests the sky is above and the water below, but the photo is upside-down. It is like a fun house mirror, undermining our certainty about the world and the structure of the poem. ↑
[EM2] A field guide follows the taxonomic categories and is convenient and efficient in the field— that is one value of separation. But Collom’s aesthetic guide is not so strict. Some top sections of the poem break the taxonomic separations with multiple entries such as SNOW GOOSE/TRUMPETER SWAN (23) or DOWITCHER/MARBLED GODWIT/CURLEW/SOLITARY SANDPIPER (34), including the last page of the poem (BLUEBIRD/MOUNTAIN BLUEBIRD) which also, oddly, has no ampersands. This incongruity is at the heart of Collom’s sense of humor: “We don’t perceive the world, we grok the simplified version that fits in our brain. And from this contrived intelligibility, humor momentarily (and ultimately!) takes the breath, with its impropriety, its surprise. Humor being basically a snapshot of the objective swirl, glimpsed behind the curtain.” (ecopoetics 4/5, p. 51). In short, if you have your head in your field guide you might miss the whip-poor-will. ↑
[EM3] Collom challenges ego-centric views through his method. Not only does he use the words of the authors in The Birds of America but he also utilizes sections where those authors traverse into speculative bird consciousness “all is ground out/according to the bird’s own way of thinking” (in reference to how the Catbird appropriates the “grist” of sound in its environment); bird sound (“crack-a-day-o! crack-a-day-o!”); and quotes from historical naturalists like Frank Chapman or John Burroughs. Birds and the responses they evoke in their observers are the vehicle for these forays in consciousness. It is hard to locate Collom’s self in all this. ↑
[JS4] I like this paragraph a lot, but it seems to contradict what I’m saying. If so, say that you don’t agree or I’ll change my phrase if you want to agree. Maybe we should talk about this, because your paragraph is very convincing. ↑
[EM5] One way to look at this book is as a resilient system. The structure has an incredible amount of redundancy. In so many of our systems and in so many of our poetries we are looking for efficient systems that eradicate redundancy but a certain amount of redundancy in the system is necessary as conditions become less stable, as in a situation of climate change with its increased storm surge and flooding. There is also a considerable amount of modularity in Exchanges as well. In general, the disjunctive quality of the ampersands provides an opportunity to interchange the tops and bottoms of the poem, creating a surplus of readings without more “material.” The permutations that are possible by interchanging the published order of poems exceeds a million combinations. Imagine a solar cell that produces that much energy. ↑
[JS6] This is a good point but you have not made it clear. It also repeats itself. I think it’s fair to say that poetry does use repetition of words as in Poe or rhyme in general. I do think that human efficiency takes dangerous risks. Nevertheless we cannot build cost effective solar energy systems that are only as efficient as photosynthesis. Some times we need efficiency to reduce our risks of naturally occurring problems—surplus is an example. ↑
[EM7] & the birds. It is hard to know but from reading the Acknowledgements it seems that almost everything in this book was recycled. Every time I thought Collom had injected his own line in the top section it was always in the source text. Much of the bottom is reused poems, unplaced translations, student work, or other appropriated texts. You could question whether anything is new. “This book is in large part a collage of materials (like a magpie’s nest).” Combined with the redundancy and modularity above, this makes for a very sustainable cultural model, laying out a possible way forward for the species, while including organism scale concerns. Collom is both the author and not the author, another example of the importance of a dialethic logic to the future. ↑
[EM8] The naiveté may belie a cleverness that is also critical for environmental poetics. There is another delightful visual confusion in the BALD EAGLE “poem” where there is a rudimentary rendering of a bird which on further examination could also be the “eyeworm” described in the poem the drawing overlays. One of my favorite moments in the book is a not-so-subtle collision between “Terry L. Hauf, a farmer” and a golden eagle in the fog as reported in the Rocky Mountain Times in the bottom section of STELLER’S JAY (p. 65) that is titled “GETTING CLOSE.” The encounter puts Mr. Hauf in the hospital for eye surgery. Rather than a mystical encounter, this change in vision for Mr. Hauf is completely (comically) immanent, and the eagle is “dazed” too. Throughout the book there is an epistemological concern about knowledge (vision) and how much we have acquired or not. ↑
[EM9] Collom addresses survival most directly in THAT THE ECONOMISTS (ULTIMATE SAGES OF A MATERIALIST WORLD) ARE LUDICROUSLY CAUGHT SHORT (p. 60) which, based on the Table of Contents, is still part of the bottom section of RUBY-THROATED HUMMINGBIRD (p. 59). It argues convincingly a la Kim Rosenfield in Re:evolution that one of the biggest challenges to our future survival is
an
incredibly
stubborn
preservation
instinct
for
our
paradigms,
as
if
they
were
our
very
selves. (p. 60)
[JS10] Agree with this section until the end. When he says “as if” he means an equation: Paradigm preservation is self-preservation. See arguments about metaphor as real in Oops!. ↑
[EM11] With the ampersand, Collom might be trading a diagram for a paradigm. To convey many of the synthetic effects in these poems he could have used another symbol like “+” or “=” or others. What is unique about the ampersand is that it communicates the flows but uses a tangled symbol. The flows resemble naturals systems like streams rather than abstracted models, while in most cases serving as this “middle term” between the top and bottom in an abstracted model. ↑
[EM12] There is an argument to be made that those tendencies in Collom relate to the fact that he had an experience of the pre-Anthropocene, at least culturally, if not geologically, especially if you date it the way that the philosopher Timothy Morton does to 1945: “when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth’s crust.” Although from an early age Collom was making connections between birds and himself, this interconnection was voluntary. Now it is involuntary. Morton goes on: “Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick-headed of us make decisive contact with non-humans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium.” What is so exciting about Collom’s work and why it is a predecessor to so much ecopoetics is that it was experimenting with a cultural Anthropocene that has still not been fully realized. ↑
[EM13] & Collom is tempted by the totalizing principle and that is the attraction of Rilke and Meister Eckhart. They have seductive rhetorics and could look like navigational aids in this exploration. Rhetoric is at the center of this work and Collom struggles with this, writing
“yes, I am an animal, . . .
But then Nature clicks back, inside our inner rhetoric,
to a solemn rectangle of cute leaves, off somewhere.” (58)
It is as if there is something in our own human nature that frustrates the language and structures we need for our own survival. At the scale of this book, Collom counteracts these tendencies by inventing this rhetorical prostheses with the ampersand that provides a permeable, resilient, poetic structure that goes beyond ego without dismissing survival. ↑
