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This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry
Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings, and these traces define a collective voice in modern poetry independent of the more specific influences and backgrounds of the poets themselves. In This Compost Rasula surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview. Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s--Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan--and their successors. But This Compost extends to include earlier poets like Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other contemporary poets. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson also make appearances. Rasula draws this diverse group of poets together, uncovering how the past is a "compost" fertilizing the present. He looks at the heritage of ancient lore and the legacy of modern history and colonial violence as factors contributing to ecological imperatives in modern poetry. This Compost restores the dialogue between poetic language and the geophysical, biological realm of nature that so much postmodern discourse has sought to silence. It is a fully developed, carefully argued book that deals with an underrepresented element in modern American culture, where the natural world and those who write about it have been greatly neglected in contemporary literary history and theory.
- GenresPoetry
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 16, 2009
I love this fucking book. This is kind of my Bible. Basically, this is the only book that satisfactorily unites my ecopoetics head and my mythopoeic occult head. And I love it. And I keep reading it. And, on top of that, the most epic bibliography. The most important bibliography. I love this book. In the future, when I live closer to poets, I want to do a reading group just for this book and it's bibliography.
January 8, 2019
Reading belated in regard to where my own thinking has gone & this review is full of rejections (of some modes I’ve previously adopted). So it’s kind of drag. But a drag I hope to use to nuance a more positive poetics.
Like the total simultaneous surface (multitemporal surfacing) of denaturalized fragments Rasula idealizes, his book is a series of short non-accretive, suggestive essays. Rasula’s constant point of departure is that poems exist as compost/commons in a library of similarly decaying texts. In relation to this compost, one is both a reader and writer (Rasula’s “wreading”), inhaling texts, transforming them into new works that retain the traces of the old. All of this is animated by a kind of Lucretian lightning / atomic force. It’s a way of describing modernism’s drive toward totalization. Rasula quoting Eugene Jolas: “The ‘poem’ must change into a mantic compost which organizes the expanding consciousness of ‘the expanding universe’”(2). The poem drives toward cosmic consciousness.
Doesn’t give me much pleasure to say that I found this to be a frequently compelling work with big, disturbing flaws. Heriberto Yepez’ brilliant Empire of Neomemory is one major source of much of my discomfort w/this text, for sure.
But before we get to my big stinking concerns w/Rasula with arguments and assumptions, some of the smaller claims he makes along the way are useful, particularly that earl English romantic poetry and later American romantic poetry was separated “by nothing less than the recovery of half the total span of the Western literary record....Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe and Whtiman can be read as inaugurating an imaginal bibliographic recovery of the oldest written records.” And, true to the poetics he examines, Rasula quotes copiously. There’s portable wisdom here from Pucci, Ponge, Heraclitus, and Williams. Consider the limitations of this kind of archive tho...
Okay, the problems:
Defining American poetics as a relation with the dead:
-Defining poetics as a relation with the dead is to assume all is equal as source material, that anything can be shaken out of its contexts because it is already decaying in a midden heap. Rasula, outside of one crucial chapter, does not admit how this stance—this false ontology of atomized language and texts violently produces this atomization, decontextualization. It assumes that texts arrive at the ‘wreader’ without the authors intention attached, without meanings and values various other readers and communities have worked to attach to texts. If we are to take Rasula’s metaphors seriously, the compost writer, the reaper rather than the reader, kills and harvests the organs of some texts. This reader makes or keeps texts dead. They’re something of a Dr. Frankenstein. Rasula: “Writing commemorates a relationship to death, a faith in the transmissibility of the dead psyche.” “The dead are a library, a fulcrum of layers that unfold, unwrap, untomb” (40). Poets forage “among necropolitan ancestry” and are stronger for it (74).
One problem with situating the self as in correspondence with living and dead sending letters and sense that it is for himself from across these gaps (sense of destiny) removes one from company of those closest to self and the capacity of a poetry oriented toward and responsive to a social present. Yepez on Olson, who Rasula is a disciple of, “Between him and his closest neighbor there were always centuries of distance. He was already member of a lineage that was itself a gathering of phantasms” (12).
Yepez invites us to rethink the Olsonian line as studded with solipsistic outcasts whose method of omnivorous incorporations leads to ironic detachment (rather than cosmic perspective). The ironic man is one “who has appropriated everything, recycling and reorganizing it. He can take nothing seriously because it all has the same value; even more so because this value-granting is done by himself. And this value-granting solipsistic subject, capriciously absolutist, has for some time now refused to give value to anything, and so his appropriation of the world—his favorite pantopia!—has led him to burnout and to indifference.” I would like to see Rasula account for critiques along these lines. Why shouldn’t we see poems as the rancid gurgle of the corpse-eater’s gut? Why not consider that to forage among the dead is to desecrate, desacralize. He follows this line of thinking when he asks “Is inspiration to be understood as a kind of predation?” Then describes Eliot’s The Waste Land as cannibalizing a living literature of classic titles “for its nutrients, skull soup, and much of it was being flushed through Eliot’s poem as a kind of sewage” (76-77). Rasula doesn’t pursue the social implications of violently dismembering texts or how the action of the necropolitan poems he holds in higher esteem is any different from Eliot.
Is this an ecological text?
Rasula: “I do think of poems as ecosystems.”
Rasula is far more interested in ontology and cosmology. Ecology cannot be considered outside of specific dynamic relations between networks of actors, relations of energy in place—when it is far more interested in universalizing and de-relationing // alienating everything from its context in asserting the simultaneity, foldedness, and immanence of all things. (Rasula’s ideal: “a poetics attentive to (and retentive of) crumplings of discourses into folds and redundantcies, vulvic recesses and hollows, fluency become granular, textured” (142).
From Harraway, Tsing, and Nixon, I think in the anthropocene, we need ecology to be alert to the agency of non-human life and ecologies that account for the diffuse relations of human and non-human actors. Heck, I’d take some soil science in compost, at least, some brown ecology. Rasula seems more interested in occult, chthonic forces under the tissues of ecologies full of actually living things. From the insights of Stoler, I’m not convinced by ecological poetics interested in ruins, mud, slag, w/o being interested in the production of those ruiners.
In a sense, this is a shortcoming of some Lucretianisms: emphasis on the animation of the clinamen (“tiniest aperture opening on animation”) that leads people to mistake the primal scene of atoms falling on an empty plane for history. They make the initial Lucretian void perpetual, the poet, in the void, a reanimator.
Like the total simultaneous surface (multitemporal surfacing) of denaturalized fragments Rasula idealizes, his book is a series of short non-accretive, suggestive essays. Rasula’s constant point of departure is that poems exist as compost/commons in a library of similarly decaying texts. In relation to this compost, one is both a reader and writer (Rasula’s “wreading”), inhaling texts, transforming them into new works that retain the traces of the old. All of this is animated by a kind of Lucretian lightning / atomic force. It’s a way of describing modernism’s drive toward totalization. Rasula quoting Eugene Jolas: “The ‘poem’ must change into a mantic compost which organizes the expanding consciousness of ‘the expanding universe’”(2). The poem drives toward cosmic consciousness.
Doesn’t give me much pleasure to say that I found this to be a frequently compelling work with big, disturbing flaws. Heriberto Yepez’ brilliant Empire of Neomemory is one major source of much of my discomfort w/this text, for sure.
But before we get to my big stinking concerns w/Rasula with arguments and assumptions, some of the smaller claims he makes along the way are useful, particularly that earl English romantic poetry and later American romantic poetry was separated “by nothing less than the recovery of half the total span of the Western literary record....Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Poe and Whtiman can be read as inaugurating an imaginal bibliographic recovery of the oldest written records.” And, true to the poetics he examines, Rasula quotes copiously. There’s portable wisdom here from Pucci, Ponge, Heraclitus, and Williams. Consider the limitations of this kind of archive tho...
Okay, the problems:
Defining American poetics as a relation with the dead:
-Defining poetics as a relation with the dead is to assume all is equal as source material, that anything can be shaken out of its contexts because it is already decaying in a midden heap. Rasula, outside of one crucial chapter, does not admit how this stance—this false ontology of atomized language and texts violently produces this atomization, decontextualization. It assumes that texts arrive at the ‘wreader’ without the authors intention attached, without meanings and values various other readers and communities have worked to attach to texts. If we are to take Rasula’s metaphors seriously, the compost writer, the reaper rather than the reader, kills and harvests the organs of some texts. This reader makes or keeps texts dead. They’re something of a Dr. Frankenstein. Rasula: “Writing commemorates a relationship to death, a faith in the transmissibility of the dead psyche.” “The dead are a library, a fulcrum of layers that unfold, unwrap, untomb” (40). Poets forage “among necropolitan ancestry” and are stronger for it (74).
One problem with situating the self as in correspondence with living and dead sending letters and sense that it is for himself from across these gaps (sense of destiny) removes one from company of those closest to self and the capacity of a poetry oriented toward and responsive to a social present. Yepez on Olson, who Rasula is a disciple of, “Between him and his closest neighbor there were always centuries of distance. He was already member of a lineage that was itself a gathering of phantasms” (12).
Yepez invites us to rethink the Olsonian line as studded with solipsistic outcasts whose method of omnivorous incorporations leads to ironic detachment (rather than cosmic perspective). The ironic man is one “who has appropriated everything, recycling and reorganizing it. He can take nothing seriously because it all has the same value; even more so because this value-granting is done by himself. And this value-granting solipsistic subject, capriciously absolutist, has for some time now refused to give value to anything, and so his appropriation of the world—his favorite pantopia!—has led him to burnout and to indifference.” I would like to see Rasula account for critiques along these lines. Why shouldn’t we see poems as the rancid gurgle of the corpse-eater’s gut? Why not consider that to forage among the dead is to desecrate, desacralize. He follows this line of thinking when he asks “Is inspiration to be understood as a kind of predation?” Then describes Eliot’s The Waste Land as cannibalizing a living literature of classic titles “for its nutrients, skull soup, and much of it was being flushed through Eliot’s poem as a kind of sewage” (76-77). Rasula doesn’t pursue the social implications of violently dismembering texts or how the action of the necropolitan poems he holds in higher esteem is any different from Eliot.
Is this an ecological text?
Rasula: “I do think of poems as ecosystems.”
Rasula is far more interested in ontology and cosmology. Ecology cannot be considered outside of specific dynamic relations between networks of actors, relations of energy in place—when it is far more interested in universalizing and de-relationing // alienating everything from its context in asserting the simultaneity, foldedness, and immanence of all things. (Rasula’s ideal: “a poetics attentive to (and retentive of) crumplings of discourses into folds and redundantcies, vulvic recesses and hollows, fluency become granular, textured” (142).
From Harraway, Tsing, and Nixon, I think in the anthropocene, we need ecology to be alert to the agency of non-human life and ecologies that account for the diffuse relations of human and non-human actors. Heck, I’d take some soil science in compost, at least, some brown ecology. Rasula seems more interested in occult, chthonic forces under the tissues of ecologies full of actually living things. From the insights of Stoler, I’m not convinced by ecological poetics interested in ruins, mud, slag, w/o being interested in the production of those ruiners.
In a sense, this is a shortcoming of some Lucretianisms: emphasis on the animation of the clinamen (“tiniest aperture opening on animation”) that leads people to mistake the primal scene of atoms falling on an empty plane for history. They make the initial Lucretian void perpetual, the poet, in the void, a reanimator.
May 30, 2008
I really liked this book. I learn so much about writing and composing arguments from Rasula. His whole premise of pulling from American poets to show community and collaboration is beautiful. At times, I have no clue what he is talking about. I need to read this book four more times, but the first time around led me to his basic arguments, which does and does not satisfy me.
May 5, 2010
wish i could give 6 stars or 7 or a milky way
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews