WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.750 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.750 --> 00:00:01.570 align:middle line:90% Thank you, Juliana. 00:00:01.570 --> 00:00:05.070 align:middle line:84% And I also want to thank Gail and Cybele and the Poetry 00:00:05.070 --> 00:00:06.520 align:middle line:90% Center for having me. 00:00:06.520 --> 00:00:08.340 align:middle line:84% It's great to be back in the Southwest 00:00:08.340 --> 00:00:11.100 align:middle line:84% in this incredible space for poetry. 00:00:11.100 --> 00:00:12.510 align:middle line:90% Thank you for coming out. 00:00:12.510 --> 00:00:14.430 align:middle line:84% So I was asked to do two things tonight, 00:00:14.430 --> 00:00:17.610 align:middle line:84% and it won't be easy to fit it into the time allotted. 00:00:17.610 --> 00:00:20.340 align:middle line:84% One is to give a talk, and the other was to read some poetry. 00:00:20.340 --> 00:00:22.900 align:middle line:90% And I'll try to do both. 00:00:22.900 --> 00:00:26.310 align:middle line:84% And I think that editing this magazine 00:00:26.310 --> 00:00:29.940 align:middle line:84% has created the misconception that I actually 00:00:29.940 --> 00:00:32.820 align:middle line:90% have a theory of ecopoetics. 00:00:32.820 --> 00:00:35.790 align:middle line:90% And I thought to confront that. 00:00:35.790 --> 00:00:37.770 align:middle line:84% I pulled up the original call for submissions 00:00:37.770 --> 00:00:40.290 align:middle line:84% to the magazine, which I put out in 2000. 00:00:40.290 --> 00:00:45.480 align:middle line:84% And I'll just read that for you to start, "Ecopoetics, 00:00:45.480 --> 00:00:47.910 align:middle line:90% Call for Submissions." 00:00:47.910 --> 00:00:49.800 align:middle line:90% This still applies, by the way. 00:00:49.800 --> 00:00:51.930 align:middle line:84% Now that the days are longer, consider 00:00:51.930 --> 00:00:57.060 align:middle line:84% contributing to Ecopoetics/writing surrounds. 00:00:57.060 --> 00:01:00.180 align:middle line:84% While honoring the long tradition of nature writing, 00:01:00.180 --> 00:01:04.140 align:middle line:84% Ecopoetics finds pastoralism, art representing nature, 00:01:04.140 --> 00:01:05.790 align:middle line:90% at an impasse. 00:01:05.790 --> 00:01:07.890 align:middle line:84% At the same time, the writing edge 00:01:07.890 --> 00:01:10.650 align:middle line:84% seems to offer no new take on surrounds, 00:01:10.650 --> 00:01:14.160 align:middle line:84% mainly environmental silence or passive regrets. 00:01:14.160 --> 00:01:16.710 align:middle line:84% Actually, I don't think that's true anymore, thankfully. 00:01:16.710 --> 00:01:18.660 align:middle line:84% If there are exceptions, Ecopoetics 00:01:18.660 --> 00:01:20.400 align:middle line:90% hopes to gather them. 00:01:20.400 --> 00:01:25.350 align:middle line:84% Ecopoetics seeks responses to the question, where is writing? 00:01:25.350 --> 00:01:29.910 align:middle line:84% Whose leaves are contiguous to body, street, yard, park 00:01:29.910 --> 00:01:35.820 align:middle line:84% or waterfront, sky, lawn, brownfield, industry, farmland 00:01:35.820 --> 00:01:40.020 align:middle line:84% or the wild, environs from the porch to the South Pole, 00:01:40.020 --> 00:01:43.200 align:middle line:84% in every case peopled with more than humans? 00:01:43.200 --> 00:01:46.980 align:middle line:84% If, as poet Frank O'Hara claims, quote, 00:01:46.980 --> 00:01:49.170 align:middle line:84% "one never need leave the confines of New York 00:01:49.170 --> 00:01:52.350 align:middle line:84% to get all the greenery one wishes," end quote. 00:01:52.350 --> 00:01:54.690 align:middle line:84% Anywhere entails an extended sense 00:01:54.690 --> 00:01:57.750 align:middle line:84% of people into other species and a greenery 00:01:57.750 --> 00:02:02.790 align:middle line:84% subject to waste mismanagement flows and deposits of gases, 00:02:02.790 --> 00:02:05.790 align:middle line:84% heavy metals and synthetic organic compounds, 00:02:05.790 --> 00:02:10.110 align:middle line:84% economics and the growing map of environmental justice. 00:02:10.110 --> 00:02:13.380 align:middle line:84% Might not discourses and practices of soil, water, air, 00:02:13.380 --> 00:02:15.990 align:middle line:90% energy make poetics? 00:02:15.990 --> 00:02:18.720 align:middle line:84% Responses from other languages, especially translated 00:02:18.720 --> 00:02:21.660 align:middle line:84% along north-south lines are urgently sought. 00:02:21.660 --> 00:02:24.450 align:middle line:84% Examples and discussion both are invited. 00:02:24.450 --> 00:02:28.800 align:middle line:84% Poems, translations, essays, reviews, letters, journals, 00:02:28.800 --> 00:02:33.300 align:middle line:84% investigations, lists, divination, prayers, riddles, 00:02:33.300 --> 00:02:37.140 align:middle line:84% maps, documented acts, performances and installations, 00:02:37.140 --> 00:02:42.760 align:middle line:84% unearthings, practical advice, et cetera will be considered. 00:02:42.760 --> 00:02:45.150 align:middle line:84% So that's a mouthful, and maybe the journal 00:02:45.150 --> 00:02:47.820 align:middle line:84% has lived up to about 10% of that so far. 00:02:47.820 --> 00:02:51.900 align:middle line:84% But my idea was really to create a site, 00:02:51.900 --> 00:02:56.040 align:middle line:84% not a theory or an idea but a site that writers and makers 00:02:56.040 --> 00:02:59.370 align:middle line:84% in the broader sense of poet, you know someone who makes-- 00:02:59.370 --> 00:03:02.660 align:middle line:84% could be visually, could be in words-- 00:03:02.660 --> 00:03:05.310 align:middle line:84% could come to you and have a conversation 00:03:05.310 --> 00:03:08.700 align:middle line:84% around the environment and some of the issues 00:03:08.700 --> 00:03:09.450 align:middle line:90% that we're facing. 00:03:09.450 --> 00:03:13.920 align:middle line:90% 00:03:13.920 --> 00:03:16.410 align:middle line:84% I also wanted it to be a field-ready journal, so 00:03:16.410 --> 00:03:17.550 align:middle line:90% small-sized. 00:03:17.550 --> 00:03:19.290 align:middle line:84% I include a blank page in the back 00:03:19.290 --> 00:03:21.930 align:middle line:84% that I encourage contributors to take outside and do something 00:03:21.930 --> 00:03:24.900 align:middle line:90% with and send in to the journal. 00:03:24.900 --> 00:03:29.190 align:middle line:84% And it really was this idea of edge 00:03:29.190 --> 00:03:32.340 align:middle line:84% that I was borrowing from ecology, edge effect. 00:03:32.340 --> 00:03:34.350 align:middle line:84% I was learning environmental studies 00:03:34.350 --> 00:03:38.550 align:middle line:84% that edge habitat between a meadow and forest for example 00:03:38.550 --> 00:03:40.320 align:middle line:84% on the edge of a stream is where you find 00:03:40.320 --> 00:03:42.940 align:middle line:90% increased diversity of species. 00:03:42.940 --> 00:03:45.330 align:middle line:84% And so I thought, let's create an edge 00:03:45.330 --> 00:03:47.730 align:middle line:84% within the literary field between different tendencies, 00:03:47.730 --> 00:03:51.690 align:middle line:84% different practices, different languages, different modes, 00:03:51.690 --> 00:03:57.042 align:middle line:84% handwriting as well as print and see what happens. 00:03:57.042 --> 00:03:58.750 align:middle line:84% I've since learned edges are problematic, 00:03:58.750 --> 00:04:01.320 align:middle line:84% and there's fragmentation that happens as well. 00:04:01.320 --> 00:04:04.980 align:middle line:90% But I just wanted-- 00:04:04.980 --> 00:04:06.930 align:middle line:84% so that's really where the journal began. 00:04:06.930 --> 00:04:13.020 align:middle line:84% Also, there was sort of a practice of recycled paper. 00:04:13.020 --> 00:04:15.240 align:middle line:84% And the first cover was literally 00:04:15.240 --> 00:04:18.540 align:middle line:84% the color of money, a paper made by Crayon Papers called 00:04:18.540 --> 00:04:21.600 align:middle line:84% Old Money, cotton-based, recycled money paper. 00:04:21.600 --> 00:04:24.090 align:middle line:84% The second one was denim blue jeans. 00:04:24.090 --> 00:04:26.730 align:middle line:90% So one of them printed locally. 00:04:26.730 --> 00:04:29.820 align:middle line:84% So all these things happen, and over time 00:04:29.820 --> 00:04:32.880 align:middle line:84% as all this amazing work came in, 00:04:32.880 --> 00:04:36.660 align:middle line:84% I started to look back and try to think about what 00:04:36.660 --> 00:04:38.800 align:middle line:84% patterns I was seeing as I was being asked, 00:04:38.800 --> 00:04:39.750 align:middle line:90% what is ecopoetics? 00:04:39.750 --> 00:04:41.830 align:middle line:90% And I saw four things. 00:04:41.830 --> 00:04:44.280 align:middle line:84% One was there were kinds of poems 00:04:44.280 --> 00:04:47.310 align:middle line:84% that refer to the environment that you might call 00:04:47.310 --> 00:04:50.610 align:middle line:84% topological, sort of the environment as a topos 00:04:50.610 --> 00:04:55.470 align:middle line:84% or a topic, but also that are referring to. 00:04:55.470 --> 00:04:58.560 align:middle line:90% Prose does this. 00:04:58.560 --> 00:05:00.510 align:middle line:84% And then there were tropological poems. 00:05:00.510 --> 00:05:02.840 align:middle line:84% There's a tropological motive of a metaphorical motive, 00:05:02.840 --> 00:05:03.590 align:middle line:90% figurative motive. 00:05:03.590 --> 00:05:07.440 align:middle line:84% The poet is trying to make a poem that is like an ecosystem 00:05:07.440 --> 00:05:11.280 align:middle line:84% or trying to model or resemble some sort of natural process. 00:05:11.280 --> 00:05:15.000 align:middle line:84% And semblance is great, but then there's 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:19.680 align:middle line:84% the third part, which I started calling anthropological 00:05:19.680 --> 00:05:22.800 align:middle line:84% that I borrowed from the artist Robert Smithson, where 00:05:22.800 --> 00:05:26.940 align:middle line:84% the poet is really engaging with the material of language 00:05:26.940 --> 00:05:32.310 align:middle line:84% and with matter as something that we're all subject to, 00:05:32.310 --> 00:05:36.580 align:middle line:90% namely decay and disturbance. 00:05:36.580 --> 00:05:40.260 align:middle line:84% And this interested me, because I 00:05:40.260 --> 00:05:42.660 align:middle line:84% think there are problems with semblance and with analogy. 00:05:42.660 --> 00:05:44.580 align:middle line:84% And for example as Derrick Jensen says, 00:05:44.580 --> 00:05:47.795 align:middle line:84% the Coho salmon don't really care 00:05:47.795 --> 00:05:49.420 align:middle line:84% if we write beautiful poems about them. 00:05:49.420 --> 00:05:52.480 align:middle line:84% They just want us to take the damn pumps out of the river. 00:05:52.480 --> 00:05:56.520 align:middle line:84% So there's this critique of poetry 00:05:56.520 --> 00:05:58.410 align:middle line:84% built into the environmental movement itself. 00:05:58.410 --> 00:06:02.190 align:middle line:84% And I don't know if anthropology is a sufficient answer to that, 00:06:02.190 --> 00:06:05.040 align:middle line:84% but I think it's maybe edging creativity closer 00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:07.250 align:middle line:84% toward a sense of what it means to be material. 00:06:07.250 --> 00:06:09.390 align:middle line:84% And what I'd like to do is now give you 00:06:09.390 --> 00:06:13.578 align:middle line:84% a talk that is exploring this third category of making 00:06:13.578 --> 00:06:15.120 align:middle line:84% that I've called the anthropological. 00:06:15.120 --> 00:06:17.250 align:middle line:84% The other would be the ethnological. 00:06:17.250 --> 00:06:19.380 align:middle line:84% And I think that one thing I've said 00:06:19.380 --> 00:06:22.110 align:middle line:84% is that an ecopoetics is always already ethnopoetics. 00:06:22.110 --> 00:06:23.940 align:middle line:84% And the multiplicity of languages 00:06:23.940 --> 00:06:27.120 align:middle line:84% is part of the multiplicity of species on the planet. 00:06:27.120 --> 00:06:29.160 align:middle line:84% But for now, there'll be a bit of that in this. 00:06:29.160 --> 00:06:30.660 align:middle line:84% But for now, I wanted to talk to you 00:06:30.660 --> 00:06:35.820 align:middle line:84% about the "Poetics of the Third Landscape, Thoughts on Things." 00:06:35.820 --> 00:06:37.815 align:middle line:84% And I'm actually going to read this 00:06:37.815 --> 00:06:39.690 align:middle line:84% in order to make this go a bit more smoothly. 00:06:39.690 --> 00:06:42.460 align:middle line:90% 00:06:42.460 --> 00:06:46.170 align:middle line:84% So please apologize, the read format here. 00:06:46.170 --> 00:06:50.130 align:middle line:84% "Thoughts on Things, Poetics of the Third Landscape." 00:06:50.130 --> 00:06:52.020 align:middle line:90% Extinction. 00:06:52.020 --> 00:06:55.050 align:middle line:84% If we are to believe the late political theorist Stephen 00:06:55.050 --> 00:06:58.020 align:middle line:84% Meyer and the theory of island biogeography 00:06:58.020 --> 00:07:01.440 align:middle line:84% as he sets it forth in his last book, The End of the Wild, 00:07:01.440 --> 00:07:04.230 align:middle line:84% the battle for the biodiversity of the current geological 00:07:04.230 --> 00:07:05.940 align:middle line:90% period is lost. 00:07:05.940 --> 00:07:10.110 align:middle line:84% Quote, "Over the next 100 years or so as many as half 00:07:10.110 --> 00:07:12.000 align:middle line:84% of the Earth's species representing 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:14.190 align:middle line:84% a quarter of the planet's genetic stock 00:07:14.190 --> 00:07:17.280 align:middle line:84% will either completely or functionally disappear. 00:07:17.280 --> 00:07:20.610 align:middle line:84% The land and the oceans will continue to teem with life, 00:07:20.610 --> 00:07:23.370 align:middle line:84% but it will be a peculiarly homogenized assemblage 00:07:23.370 --> 00:07:26.400 align:middle line:84% of organisms naturally and unnaturally selected 00:07:26.400 --> 00:07:31.620 align:middle line:84% for their compatibility with one fundamental force, us." 00:07:31.620 --> 00:07:35.070 align:middle line:84% Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's rival and collaborator, 00:07:35.070 --> 00:07:38.100 align:middle line:84% theorized that the number of species on the planet today 00:07:38.100 --> 00:07:40.710 align:middle line:84% is directly related to the number of what he called realms 00:07:40.710 --> 00:07:42.240 align:middle line:90% or biogeographical regions. 00:07:42.240 --> 00:07:45.780 align:middle line:84% And here, you can see Wallace's five realms. 00:07:45.780 --> 00:07:48.840 align:middle line:84% Species that were related on the Pangaea supercontinent 00:07:48.840 --> 00:07:51.630 align:middle line:84% have diverged genetically over the millennia 00:07:51.630 --> 00:07:54.640 align:middle line:84% that they were separated by migration and continental 00:07:54.640 --> 00:07:55.140 align:middle line:90% drift. 00:07:55.140 --> 00:07:57.970 align:middle line:90% 00:07:57.970 --> 00:07:59.740 align:middle line:84% Today's globalized human activity 00:07:59.740 --> 00:08:02.470 align:middle line:84% accelerates the process of encounter leading to Pangaea 00:08:02.470 --> 00:08:05.440 align:middle line:84% diminishing the number of realms and consequently, 00:08:05.440 --> 00:08:06.950 align:middle line:90% the number of species. 00:08:06.950 --> 00:08:08.380 align:middle line:84% So the argument is that now we're 00:08:08.380 --> 00:08:11.200 align:middle line:84% actually reversing this process as we transport species 00:08:11.200 --> 00:08:12.850 align:middle line:90% around the planet. 00:08:12.850 --> 00:08:15.520 align:middle line:84% The process of extension is accelerated by overharvesting 00:08:15.520 --> 00:08:18.040 align:middle line:84% and by the fragmentation of biogeographic islands 00:08:18.040 --> 00:08:19.750 align:middle line:84% as a result of human development, 00:08:19.750 --> 00:08:22.990 align:middle line:84% leaving fewer options for species seeking a way out 00:08:22.990 --> 00:08:25.150 align:middle line:90% of climatic cul de sacs. 00:08:25.150 --> 00:08:29.320 align:middle line:84% So again, that a continent Pangaea-- 00:08:29.320 --> 00:08:31.920 align:middle line:90% let me go back-- 00:08:31.920 --> 00:08:32.565 align:middle line:90% breaking apart. 00:08:32.565 --> 00:08:39.010 align:middle line:90% 00:08:39.010 --> 00:08:40.750 align:middle line:84% The weedy species, the species most 00:08:40.750 --> 00:08:44.140 align:middle line:84% like us will inherit the Earth, reuniting Pangaea and reversing 00:08:44.140 --> 00:08:45.980 align:middle line:90% 65 million years of evolution. 00:08:45.980 --> 00:08:48.500 align:middle line:84% This is a map devised by gardenist Gilles 00:08:48.500 --> 00:08:49.930 align:middle line:90% Clement, French gardenist. 00:08:49.930 --> 00:08:51.730 align:middle line:84% And he calls it The Global Garden. 00:08:51.730 --> 00:08:54.160 align:middle line:84% And he's taken all the different kinds of biomes 00:08:54.160 --> 00:08:55.653 align:middle line:90% and arranged them by proportion. 00:08:55.653 --> 00:08:57.070 align:middle line:84% If you're on the sides by the way, 00:08:57.070 --> 00:08:59.080 align:middle line:84% you might want to scoot your chair over. 00:08:59.080 --> 00:09:01.360 align:middle line:84% It's going to be hard to follow this. 00:09:01.360 --> 00:09:04.540 align:middle line:84% So down here, you have the temperate rainforest 00:09:04.540 --> 00:09:07.807 align:middle line:84% at the very bottom and the boreal forest at the top. 00:09:07.807 --> 00:09:09.640 align:middle line:84% In the middle, you have the tropical regions 00:09:09.640 --> 00:09:13.950 align:middle line:84% and the equatorial forests, the desert steppes. 00:09:13.950 --> 00:09:15.700 align:middle line:84% He calls this-- this is The Global Garden. 00:09:15.700 --> 00:09:19.920 align:middle line:84% This is what we have to work with now. 00:09:19.920 --> 00:09:20.420 align:middle line:90% OK. 00:09:20.420 --> 00:09:21.860 align:middle line:90% Part 2, weeds. 00:09:21.860 --> 00:09:24.770 align:middle line:84% In the scale of desirability, opposite threatened species, 00:09:24.770 --> 00:09:28.580 align:middle line:84% we locate weeds, rabbit, Colorado potato 00:09:28.580 --> 00:09:34.610 align:middle line:84% beetle, African mosquito, cactus moth, European starling, North 00:09:34.610 --> 00:09:40.310 align:middle line:84% American muskrat, cord grass, giant African land snail, sea 00:09:40.310 --> 00:09:43.940 align:middle line:84% lamprey, purple loosestrife, Chinese mitten 00:09:43.940 --> 00:09:49.580 align:middle line:84% crab, buffelgrass, Asian tamarisk, garlic mustard, zebra 00:09:49.580 --> 00:09:54.110 align:middle line:84% mussel, Africanized honeybee, Asian longhorn beetle, 00:09:54.110 --> 00:09:58.370 align:middle line:84% European gypsy moth, fire ant, bighead carp, 00:09:58.370 --> 00:10:02.780 align:middle line:84% northern snakehead, nutria, house sparrow, brown tree 00:10:02.780 --> 00:10:07.100 align:middle line:84% snake, Japanese knotweed, marijuana, kudzu, 00:10:07.100 --> 00:10:13.340 align:middle line:84% common reed, Norway Maple, ice plant, tree of heaven, datura, 00:10:13.340 --> 00:10:18.140 align:middle line:84% giant salvinia, Russian olive, cane toad, cat, 00:10:18.140 --> 00:10:24.770 align:middle line:84% Nile perch, goat, house mouse, Amur river clam, mesquite, 00:10:24.770 --> 00:10:29.510 align:middle line:84% tumbleweed, red-vented bulbul, gray squirrel, fox, 00:10:29.510 --> 00:10:34.550 align:middle line:84% empress tree, mallard, water chestnut, giant hogweed, 00:10:34.550 --> 00:10:36.020 align:middle line:90% the list goes on. 00:10:36.020 --> 00:10:38.690 align:middle line:84% Some of those are invasives, crossing the Atlantic 00:10:38.690 --> 00:10:40.040 align:middle line:90% to the other side. 00:10:40.040 --> 00:10:43.160 align:middle line:84% The Nature Conservancy pamphlet, "America's Least Wanted-- 00:10:43.160 --> 00:10:45.890 align:middle line:84% Alien Species Invasions of US Ecosystems" 00:10:45.890 --> 00:10:49.250 align:middle line:84% exemplifies the hysteria regarding invasive species. 00:10:49.250 --> 00:10:51.710 align:middle line:84% Quote, "An invasion is underway that is 00:10:51.710 --> 00:10:54.590 align:middle line:84% undermining our nation's economy and endangering our most 00:10:54.590 --> 00:10:56.330 align:middle line:90% precious natural treasures. 00:10:56.330 --> 00:11:00.560 align:middle line:84% The intruders are alien species, non-native plants and animals 00:11:00.560 --> 00:11:03.890 align:middle line:84% introduced into this country," end quote. 00:11:03.890 --> 00:11:05.540 align:middle line:84% Obviously, this language participates 00:11:05.540 --> 00:11:07.910 align:middle line:84% in the rhetorical hyperbole meant 00:11:07.910 --> 00:11:09.770 align:middle line:90% to catalyze political change. 00:11:09.770 --> 00:11:11.930 align:middle line:84% From a cultural standpoint, however, it 00:11:11.930 --> 00:11:15.140 align:middle line:84% is troubling language, indeed, not to mention deeply ironic 00:11:15.140 --> 00:11:16.850 align:middle line:84% coming from the most invasive culture 00:11:16.850 --> 00:11:20.240 align:middle line:90% in the history of the species. 00:11:20.240 --> 00:11:21.650 align:middle line:90% Migration. 00:11:21.650 --> 00:11:23.330 align:middle line:84% The popular imagination of plants 00:11:23.330 --> 00:11:25.970 align:middle line:84% divides them into two races, the native plants 00:11:25.970 --> 00:11:27.350 align:middle line:90% and the invasive ones. 00:11:27.350 --> 00:11:29.870 align:middle line:84% The first apparently stay put while the second 00:11:29.870 --> 00:11:30.950 align:middle line:90% are on the move. 00:11:30.950 --> 00:11:32.450 align:middle line:84% There may be some biological truth 00:11:32.450 --> 00:11:35.150 align:middle line:84% to this with the distinction between rhizomic and rooting 00:11:35.150 --> 00:11:35.870 align:middle line:90% plants. 00:11:35.870 --> 00:11:38.300 align:middle line:84% But according to gardenist Gilles Clément, 00:11:38.300 --> 00:11:41.210 align:middle line:84% we should think about all plants in terms of travel rather than 00:11:41.210 --> 00:11:41.900 align:middle line:90% fixated. 00:11:41.900 --> 00:11:45.410 align:middle line:84% His volume on weeds is titled In Praise of Vagabonds. 00:11:45.410 --> 00:11:47.990 align:middle line:84% From a global perspective, the plant's essence 00:11:47.990 --> 00:11:49.670 align:middle line:90% lies in movement. 00:11:49.670 --> 00:11:53.180 align:middle line:84% The poet Charles Olson seems to agree writing in his epic work 00:11:53.180 --> 00:11:56.330 align:middle line:84% The Maximus Poems, quote, "Migration, 00:11:56.330 --> 00:11:59.690 align:middle line:84% in fact which is probably as constant in history 00:11:59.690 --> 00:12:04.500 align:middle line:84% as any one thing, migration is the pursuit by animals, plants, 00:12:04.500 --> 00:12:08.210 align:middle line:84% and men of a suitable and God's will and preferable 00:12:08.210 --> 00:12:12.590 align:middle line:84% environment, and always leads to a new center." 00:12:12.590 --> 00:12:15.470 align:middle line:84% "This," Olson added, "is the rose, is the rose, 00:12:15.470 --> 00:12:17.320 align:middle line:90% is the rose of the world." 00:12:17.320 --> 00:12:19.070 align:middle line:84% You'll see that print on the wall upstairs 00:12:19.070 --> 00:12:21.110 align:middle line:84% in the Poetry Center, by the way. 00:12:21.110 --> 00:12:22.970 align:middle line:84% At about the same time, that land artist 00:12:22.970 --> 00:12:25.850 align:middle line:84% Robert Smithson was busting art out of the gallery. 00:12:25.850 --> 00:12:28.190 align:middle line:84% Olson was chafing at the limits of the page 00:12:28.190 --> 00:12:30.260 align:middle line:84% and wrote these lines in a spiral. 00:12:30.260 --> 00:12:33.380 align:middle line:84% "An unfolded rose whose outermost petal is migration 00:12:33.380 --> 00:12:35.525 align:middle line:84% and innermost petal finds the world." 00:12:35.525 --> 00:12:38.480 align:middle line:90% 00:12:38.480 --> 00:12:41.840 align:middle line:84% In a city of brotherly love, the purple sweet blossoms 00:12:41.840 --> 00:12:44.840 align:middle line:84% of the empress tree festooned a mile long stretch of fenced 00:12:44.840 --> 00:12:45.950 align:middle line:90% off viaduct. 00:12:45.950 --> 00:12:49.610 align:middle line:84% A wild oasis suspended above the decaying urban core, 00:12:49.610 --> 00:12:53.910 align:middle line:84% an expressway border vacuum just opposite Chinatown. 00:12:53.910 --> 00:12:56.400 align:middle line:84% Quote, "Never to alight till nations 00:12:56.400 --> 00:12:59.430 align:middle line:84% sue for peace, seed pods for Excelsior, 00:12:59.430 --> 00:13:02.760 align:middle line:84% stuffing crates of Cathay porcelain castaways 00:13:02.760 --> 00:13:06.930 align:middle line:84% and ship hold broadcast over foreign soils," 00:13:06.930 --> 00:13:09.840 align:middle line:84% writes John Perlman in his poem "Royal Paulownia, 00:13:09.840 --> 00:13:12.210 align:middle line:90% the Natural History of Trees." 00:13:12.210 --> 00:13:14.790 align:middle line:84% Perlman's prose poem alludes to the Asian origin 00:13:14.790 --> 00:13:17.790 align:middle line:84% of these fast-growing trees, whose seed pods came over 00:13:17.790 --> 00:13:20.070 align:middle line:84% as packing for Chinese porcelain. 00:13:20.070 --> 00:13:22.590 align:middle line:84% Traditionally, Chinese families plant on empress 00:13:22.590 --> 00:13:25.200 align:middle line:84% tree at the birth of a daughter to be 00:13:25.200 --> 00:13:28.290 align:middle line:84% harvested for dowry furniture when she is married. 00:13:28.290 --> 00:13:30.720 align:middle line:84% Wherever we find plants, we find culture. 00:13:30.720 --> 00:13:32.550 align:middle line:84% The empress trees seem to have known 00:13:32.550 --> 00:13:35.190 align:middle line:84% where they were going when they chose this abandoned railway 00:13:35.190 --> 00:13:37.110 align:middle line:90% bed convenient to Chinatown. 00:13:37.110 --> 00:13:38.820 align:middle line:84% A recent visit to the site uncovered 00:13:38.820 --> 00:13:42.420 align:middle line:90% evidence of selective cutting. 00:13:42.420 --> 00:13:44.370 align:middle line:90% Invention. 00:13:44.370 --> 00:13:48.240 align:middle line:84% Stephen Meyer advocates that we drop the haphazard strategy 00:13:48.240 --> 00:13:50.940 align:middle line:84% of protecting some relic and ghost species, 00:13:50.940 --> 00:13:53.340 align:middle line:84% and begin to think about trans-regional schemes 00:13:53.340 --> 00:13:55.500 align:middle line:84% for the preservation and protection of huge swaths 00:13:55.500 --> 00:13:57.870 align:middle line:84% of landscape and seascape selected 00:13:57.870 --> 00:13:59.760 align:middle line:84% to protect broad ecosystem functions 00:13:59.760 --> 00:14:02.130 align:middle line:84% and services in a dynamic environment 00:14:02.130 --> 00:14:04.650 align:middle line:84% rather than species-specific needs. 00:14:04.650 --> 00:14:07.230 align:middle line:84% Incremental forces such as sexual selection 00:14:07.230 --> 00:14:10.200 align:middle line:84% no longer serve as the driving force behind species selection 00:14:10.200 --> 00:14:11.520 align:middle line:90% and evolution. 00:14:11.520 --> 00:14:14.520 align:middle line:84% The driving force is now us, human beings. 00:14:14.520 --> 00:14:16.290 align:middle line:84% We cannot try to save everything, 00:14:16.290 --> 00:14:18.090 align:middle line:84% and we'll have to make some tough choices. 00:14:18.090 --> 00:14:19.770 align:middle line:84% That's Meyer's argument, anyways. 00:14:19.770 --> 00:14:21.360 align:middle line:90% We will have to be inventive. 00:14:21.360 --> 00:14:24.690 align:middle line:84% Quote, "What would happen if there were a terrific shortage 00:14:24.690 --> 00:14:27.120 align:middle line:90% of goldenrod in the world?" 00:14:27.120 --> 00:14:31.050 align:middle line:84% Grace Paley wonders in her Thetford poems. 00:14:31.050 --> 00:14:33.450 align:middle line:84% We need and perhaps are beginning to find, 00:14:33.450 --> 00:14:35.700 align:middle line:84% wrote Marxist critic Raymond Williams, 00:14:35.700 --> 00:14:38.160 align:middle line:84% different ideas, different feelings 00:14:38.160 --> 00:14:40.050 align:middle line:84% if we are to know nature is varied, 00:14:40.050 --> 00:14:42.540 align:middle line:84% and variable nature is the changing 00:14:42.540 --> 00:14:44.790 align:middle line:90% conditions of a human world. 00:14:44.790 --> 00:14:49.830 align:middle line:84% Or as the other Williams, William Carlos, noted, quote, 00:14:49.830 --> 00:14:53.040 align:middle line:84% "Without invention, nothing is well-spaced. 00:14:53.040 --> 00:14:57.000 align:middle line:84% Unless there is a new mind, there cannot be a new line. 00:14:57.000 --> 00:15:01.140 align:middle line:84% Without invention, nothing lies under the witch hazel bush. 00:15:01.140 --> 00:15:03.930 align:middle line:84% The elder does not grow from among the hammocks, 00:15:03.930 --> 00:15:07.485 align:middle line:84% margining the all but spent channel of the old soil." 00:15:07.485 --> 00:15:11.540 align:middle line:90% 00:15:11.540 --> 00:15:14.300 align:middle line:84% In her essay on the blackberry, Rubus armeniacus, 00:15:14.300 --> 00:15:16.610 align:middle line:84% a common architectural decorative motif 00:15:16.610 --> 00:15:19.160 align:middle line:84% in the temperate mesophotic region, 00:15:19.160 --> 00:15:22.820 align:middle line:84% poet Lisa Robertson looks to the illegitimate superfluous 00:15:22.820 --> 00:15:23.900 align:middle line:90% bramble. 00:15:23.900 --> 00:15:26.563 align:middle line:84% Nowadays considered a minor invasive alien, 00:15:26.563 --> 00:15:27.980 align:middle line:84% though introduced to North America 00:15:27.980 --> 00:15:30.620 align:middle line:84% deliberately in the 19th century for lessons in what she 00:15:30.620 --> 00:15:33.560 align:middle line:90% calls soft architecture. 00:15:33.560 --> 00:15:36.110 align:middle line:84% Quote, "Tracing a mortal palimpsest 00:15:36.110 --> 00:15:39.230 align:middle line:84% of potential services and acutely compromised situations, 00:15:39.230 --> 00:15:44.450 align:middle line:84% Rubus," she writes, "shows us how to invent." 00:15:44.450 --> 00:15:47.450 align:middle line:90% So the third landscape. 00:15:47.450 --> 00:15:49.880 align:middle line:84% All management generates abandoned landscapes. 00:15:49.880 --> 00:15:52.520 align:middle line:84% Sorry, all management generates abandoned spaces. 00:15:52.520 --> 00:15:55.070 align:middle line:84% The overgrown farm fields and grubbed-up orchards 00:15:55.070 --> 00:16:00.200 align:middle line:84% spawned by EU tariff quota regimes, the vacant lots 00:16:00.200 --> 00:16:02.870 align:middle line:84% of urban sprawl, the unvisited swamps 00:16:02.870 --> 00:16:08.630 align:middle line:84% inside the motorway cloverleaf, all production entails neglect. 00:16:08.630 --> 00:16:12.320 align:middle line:84% Clément sees spaces of neglect, those neither cultivated nor 00:16:12.320 --> 00:16:13.790 align:middle line:90% preserved. 00:16:13.790 --> 00:16:16.250 align:middle line:84% As acutely compromised situations, 00:16:16.250 --> 00:16:18.620 align:middle line:84% post-industrial areas that are quickly taken over 00:16:18.620 --> 00:16:21.170 align:middle line:84% by weedy ranging pioneer species, 00:16:21.170 --> 00:16:26.630 align:middle line:84% he sees as a sites of potential relevant privation. 00:16:26.630 --> 00:16:29.540 align:middle line:84% And he urges we recognize them with the term third landscape. 00:16:29.540 --> 00:16:32.570 align:middle line:84% For Clément, the third landscape represents the biological 00:16:32.570 --> 00:16:33.350 align:middle line:90% future. 00:16:33.350 --> 00:16:36.020 align:middle line:84% And as the privileged site for biological intelligence, 00:16:36.020 --> 00:16:39.740 align:middle line:84% the aptitude for constant self-reinvention. 00:16:39.740 --> 00:16:42.020 align:middle line:84% Here, we begin to understand the long term survival 00:16:42.020 --> 00:16:44.930 align:middle line:84% strategies of other species and the migrations that lead 00:16:44.930 --> 00:16:47.330 align:middle line:90% to new centers of speciation. 00:16:47.330 --> 00:16:50.330 align:middle line:84% Diversity takes refuge in these abandoned spaces. 00:16:50.330 --> 00:16:53.480 align:middle line:84% Again, this is Clément's argument. 00:16:53.480 --> 00:16:55.700 align:middle line:84% "I can begin to find refuge in change," 00:16:55.700 --> 00:17:00.800 align:middle line:84% wrote Terry Tempest Williams, "for Christopher Dewdney. 00:17:00.800 --> 00:17:04.640 align:middle line:84% Nighthawks, crickets, bats and raccoons, 00:17:04.640 --> 00:17:08.119 align:middle line:84% unbroken wild continuum into the centers of the Great Lakes 00:17:08.119 --> 00:17:09.119 align:middle line:90% cities." 00:17:09.119 --> 00:17:11.359 align:middle line:84% That's the Canadian poet Christopher Dewdney, 00:17:11.359 --> 00:17:14.300 align:middle line:84% wonderful poet of the urban environment. 00:17:14.300 --> 00:17:16.579 align:middle line:84% The third landscape can offer critical corridors 00:17:16.579 --> 00:17:19.040 align:middle line:84% and buffer zones, ways out for species 00:17:19.040 --> 00:17:22.369 align:middle line:84% seeking to escape shrinking fragments of island habitat. 00:17:22.369 --> 00:17:24.349 align:middle line:84% Often, the wildness of such lands 00:17:24.349 --> 00:17:26.750 align:middle line:84% is but a temporary state, reprieve 00:17:26.750 --> 00:17:29.120 align:middle line:84% for a time by political, bureaucratic, 00:17:29.120 --> 00:17:30.950 align:middle line:90% and financial delay. 00:17:30.950 --> 00:17:32.720 align:middle line:84% So this is an image of what would 00:17:32.720 --> 00:17:34.970 align:middle line:90% become Central Park in 1858. 00:17:34.970 --> 00:17:39.470 align:middle line:84% And it was kind of a wild wasteland for a while, Upper 00:17:39.470 --> 00:17:40.910 align:middle line:90% Central Manhattan. 00:17:40.910 --> 00:17:43.430 align:middle line:84% "This wildness basically has the status 00:17:43.430 --> 00:17:46.130 align:middle line:84% of grass growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk." 00:17:46.130 --> 00:17:48.700 align:middle line:90% 00:17:48.700 --> 00:17:52.240 align:middle line:84% This is a piece by Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña entitled 00:17:52.240 --> 00:17:53.650 align:middle line:90% "Sidewalk Forest." 00:17:53.650 --> 00:17:56.110 align:middle line:84% Small altars on the streets of New York, 00:17:56.110 --> 00:18:00.220 align:middle line:84% air vents for the Earth, pasture born in the gutters. 00:18:00.220 --> 00:18:01.600 align:middle line:90% She calls these "Precarios." 00:18:01.600 --> 00:18:04.360 align:middle line:84% And there she does these fragile ephemeral installations 00:18:04.360 --> 00:18:07.000 align:middle line:84% that are lodged somewhere between prayer 00:18:07.000 --> 00:18:10.180 align:middle line:84% and precariousness and sort of to highlight 00:18:10.180 --> 00:18:13.570 align:middle line:84% this other life that's trying to thrive and come up 00:18:13.570 --> 00:18:15.020 align:middle line:90% through the concrete. 00:18:15.020 --> 00:18:18.400 align:middle line:84% In Gilles Clément's view, the politics of the third landscape 00:18:18.400 --> 00:18:20.320 align:middle line:90% are revolutionary. 00:18:20.320 --> 00:18:23.680 align:middle line:84% Quote, "Third landscape refers to Third Estate, 00:18:23.680 --> 00:18:25.480 align:middle line:90% and not to Third World. 00:18:25.480 --> 00:18:29.170 align:middle line:84% Space expressing neither power nor submission to power. 00:18:29.170 --> 00:18:33.070 align:middle line:84% It refers to the pamphlet of CES in 1789. 00:18:33.070 --> 00:18:34.540 align:middle line:90% What is the Third Estate? 00:18:34.540 --> 00:18:35.680 align:middle line:90% Everything. 00:18:35.680 --> 00:18:37.570 align:middle line:84% What has it accomplished up to now? 00:18:37.570 --> 00:18:38.710 align:middle line:90% Nothing. 00:18:38.710 --> 00:18:40.780 align:middle line:90% What does it aspire to become? 00:18:40.780 --> 00:18:42.880 align:middle line:90% Something." 00:18:42.880 --> 00:18:44.560 align:middle line:90% So now we move on to poetry. 00:18:44.560 --> 00:18:49.100 align:middle line:84% Field poetics, "Thoughts on Things." 00:18:49.100 --> 00:18:52.520 align:middle line:84% "Mergansers, fans on their heads. 00:18:52.520 --> 00:18:54.020 align:middle line:90% Thoughts on things. 00:18:54.020 --> 00:18:57.527 align:middle line:84% Fold, unfold above the riverbeds." 00:18:57.527 --> 00:19:00.110 align:middle line:84% This is one of my favorite poems by the poet Lorine Niedecker, 00:19:00.110 --> 00:19:01.100 align:middle line:90% Wisconsin poet. 00:19:01.100 --> 00:19:03.680 align:middle line:90% 00:19:03.680 --> 00:19:07.940 align:middle line:84% And also a great modernist of international fame. 00:19:07.940 --> 00:19:11.270 align:middle line:84% The unspoken emphasis I hear in Lorine Niedecker's poem 00:19:11.270 --> 00:19:14.630 align:middle line:90% is thoughts on things in things. 00:19:14.630 --> 00:19:17.540 align:middle line:84% As things in their own right, thoughts on things 00:19:17.540 --> 00:19:21.267 align:middle line:84% fold, unfold above the river beds. 00:19:21.267 --> 00:19:22.850 align:middle line:84% The very end of the poem has thoughts, 00:19:22.850 --> 00:19:26.090 align:middle line:84% things-- thoughts, things, fold, unfold above the river beds. 00:19:26.090 --> 00:19:29.270 align:middle line:84% Poetry for me is thoughts on things. 00:19:29.270 --> 00:19:31.580 align:middle line:84% Poems fold, unfold their thoughts 00:19:31.580 --> 00:19:35.660 align:middle line:84% with no determinate aim or intent above the riverbeds. 00:19:35.660 --> 00:19:37.820 align:middle line:84% The instructions that carry out are often 00:19:37.820 --> 00:19:41.900 align:middle line:84% as mysterious or plainly evident to the heads enjoying them 00:19:41.900 --> 00:19:45.170 align:middle line:84% as a Mergansers fan must be to the head of the Merganser. 00:19:45.170 --> 00:19:48.830 align:middle line:90% 00:19:48.830 --> 00:19:51.890 align:middle line:84% Poetry is thoughts on things, maybe a more succinct version 00:19:51.890 --> 00:19:55.400 align:middle line:84% of Charles Olson's postmodern stance of composition by field. 00:19:55.400 --> 00:19:57.560 align:middle line:84% Quote, "Getting rid of the lyrical interference 00:19:57.560 --> 00:20:00.530 align:middle line:84% of the individual as ego that peculiar presumption 00:20:00.530 --> 00:20:03.170 align:middle line:84% by which Western man has interposed himself 00:20:03.170 --> 00:20:05.480 align:middle line:84% between what he is as a creature of nature 00:20:05.480 --> 00:20:07.490 align:middle line:84% with certain instructions to carry out, 00:20:07.490 --> 00:20:09.410 align:middle line:84% and those other creations of nature, which we 00:20:09.410 --> 00:20:12.350 align:middle line:84% may, with no derogation, call objects. 00:20:12.350 --> 00:20:15.560 align:middle line:84% For man is himself an object, whatever he 00:20:15.560 --> 00:20:17.390 align:middle line:90% may take to be his advantages." 00:20:17.390 --> 00:20:18.800 align:middle line:90% That was Olson's language, man. 00:20:18.800 --> 00:20:21.650 align:middle line:90% 00:20:21.650 --> 00:20:24.170 align:middle line:84% For man is himself an object whatever he 00:20:24.170 --> 00:20:26.300 align:middle line:90% may take to be his advantages. 00:20:26.300 --> 00:20:29.120 align:middle line:84% The more we attend to the thinghood of the artifact we 00:20:29.120 --> 00:20:32.310 align:middle line:84% are shaping as constituted in a field of relations, 00:20:32.310 --> 00:20:35.870 align:middle line:84% the more we let ourselves be used as things in our own right 00:20:35.870 --> 00:20:38.450 align:middle line:84% by the field in which the thing participates. 00:20:38.450 --> 00:20:40.520 align:middle line:84% That is, the more we let the demands of the field 00:20:40.520 --> 00:20:42.015 align:middle line:90% dictate our choices. 00:20:42.015 --> 00:20:43.640 align:middle line:84% This is my understanding of composition 00:20:43.640 --> 00:20:49.160 align:middle line:84% by field or invention in one post-modern sense. 00:20:49.160 --> 00:20:51.350 align:middle line:90% Anthropology. 00:20:51.350 --> 00:20:54.800 align:middle line:84% Artist Robert Smithson took note of the entropic landscapes 00:20:54.800 --> 00:20:56.810 align:middle line:84% left in the wake of industrial production. 00:20:56.810 --> 00:20:59.600 align:middle line:84% And after Claude Levi-Strauss called for the discipline 00:20:59.600 --> 00:21:01.500 align:middle line:90% of anthropologie. 00:21:01.500 --> 00:21:04.850 align:middle line:84% It's like a bad French pun, but anthropologie. 00:21:04.850 --> 00:21:07.400 align:middle line:84% And he wrote, today's artist is beginning 00:21:07.400 --> 00:21:09.530 align:middle line:84% to perceive this process of disintegrating 00:21:09.530 --> 00:21:12.290 align:middle line:84% frameworks as a highly developed condition. 00:21:12.290 --> 00:21:13.880 align:middle line:84% Claude Levi-Strauss has suggested 00:21:13.880 --> 00:21:17.000 align:middle line:84% we develop a new discipline called anthropology. 00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:19.760 align:middle line:84% The artist and the critic should develop something similar. 00:21:19.760 --> 00:21:21.830 align:middle line:84% The buried cities of the Yucatan are 00:21:21.830 --> 00:21:24.110 align:middle line:84% enormous and heterogeneous time capsules 00:21:24.110 --> 00:21:28.250 align:middle line:84% full of lost abstractions and broken frameworks. 00:21:28.250 --> 00:21:31.250 align:middle line:84% There, the wilderness and the city intermingle. 00:21:31.250 --> 00:21:34.040 align:middle line:84% Nature spills into the abstract frames. 00:21:34.040 --> 00:21:36.650 align:middle line:84% The containing narrative of an entire civilization 00:21:36.650 --> 00:21:39.050 align:middle line:84% breaks apart to form another kind of order. 00:21:39.050 --> 00:21:41.750 align:middle line:84% A film is capable of picking up the pieces. 00:21:41.750 --> 00:21:43.940 align:middle line:84% The relationship between pollution and filmmaking 00:21:43.940 --> 00:21:46.640 align:middle line:84% strikes me as a worthwhile area of investigation. 00:21:46.640 --> 00:21:49.310 align:middle line:84% These are photographs from the Landschaftspark designed 00:21:49.310 --> 00:21:52.010 align:middle line:84% by Peter Latz in Duisburg, North Germany. 00:21:52.010 --> 00:21:54.710 align:middle line:84% It's an amazing sight, a reclaimed steel factory. 00:21:54.710 --> 00:21:58.380 align:middle line:90% 00:21:58.380 --> 00:22:03.690 align:middle line:84% That was Robert Smithson on anthropology. 00:22:03.690 --> 00:22:05.520 align:middle line:90% Production entails neglect. 00:22:05.520 --> 00:22:07.740 align:middle line:84% As Clément puts it, all management generates 00:22:07.740 --> 00:22:09.000 align:middle line:90% an abandoned area. 00:22:09.000 --> 00:22:10.830 align:middle line:84% To paraphrase Smithson, the relationship 00:22:10.830 --> 00:22:14.100 align:middle line:84% between pollution and poetry might bear some investigating. 00:22:14.100 --> 00:22:16.080 align:middle line:84% In his study of urban development, 00:22:16.080 --> 00:22:19.800 align:middle line:84% City Eclogue's poet Ed Roberson phrases it 00:22:19.800 --> 00:22:22.620 align:middle line:90% in terms of the human cost. 00:22:22.620 --> 00:22:27.240 align:middle line:84% Ed Roberson writes, "Their buildings raised they 00:22:27.240 --> 00:22:30.570 align:middle line:84% ghosts, their color that haze of plaster dust, 00:22:30.570 --> 00:22:33.960 align:middle line:84% their blocks of bulldozed air open to light. 00:22:33.960 --> 00:22:36.510 align:middle line:84% People lived where it weren't open, 00:22:36.510 --> 00:22:38.550 align:middle line:84% a people whose beginning is dispersed 00:22:38.550 --> 00:22:42.420 align:middle line:84% by a vagrant progress whose settlement is overturned 00:22:42.420 --> 00:22:45.240 align:middle line:84% for the better of a highway through to someone else's 00:22:45.240 --> 00:22:47.670 align:middle line:90% possibility." 00:22:47.670 --> 00:22:52.050 align:middle line:84% "The better of a highway through to someone else's possibility," 00:22:52.050 --> 00:22:54.690 align:middle line:84% that's from his poem, "The Open," Ed Robeson. 00:22:54.690 --> 00:22:58.170 align:middle line:84% Here, as Peter Larkin notes in his study of urban woods, 00:22:58.170 --> 00:23:01.440 align:middle line:84% the urban planner is opening up, closes down so much else, 00:23:01.440 --> 00:23:03.480 align:middle line:90% alas an old story. 00:23:03.480 --> 00:23:05.640 align:middle line:84% An anthropology on the other hand 00:23:05.640 --> 00:23:08.670 align:middle line:84% seeks a better balance between production and neglect. 00:23:08.670 --> 00:23:13.050 align:middle line:84% In the case of writing, between forcing the right conjunction 00:23:13.050 --> 00:23:17.850 align:middle line:84% of sound, image, and idea, and somehow letting the words be. 00:23:17.850 --> 00:23:19.560 align:middle line:84% In the case of conceptualization, 00:23:19.560 --> 00:23:22.620 align:middle line:84% between developing and disintegrating frameworks. 00:23:22.620 --> 00:23:25.350 align:middle line:84% And in the case of ethics, between someone else's 00:23:25.350 --> 00:23:26.430 align:middle line:90% possibility. 00:23:26.430 --> 00:23:29.700 align:middle line:84% And as Robeson might put it, someone-- 00:23:29.700 --> 00:23:32.400 align:middle line:84% sorry, in the case of ethics between someone's possibility 00:23:32.400 --> 00:23:35.640 align:middle line:84% and, as Ed Roberson might put it, someone or something else's 00:23:35.640 --> 00:23:38.460 align:middle line:90% possibility. 00:23:38.460 --> 00:23:41.640 align:middle line:84% In an interview, Robert Smithson described his artworks 00:23:41.640 --> 00:23:45.780 align:middle line:84% as quote, "entropic situations that hold themselves together. 00:23:45.780 --> 00:23:48.060 align:middle line:84% It's like the Spiral Jetty is physical enough 00:23:48.060 --> 00:23:51.450 align:middle line:84% to be able to withstand all these climate changes. 00:23:51.450 --> 00:23:53.760 align:middle line:84% Yet it's intimately involved with those climate changes 00:23:53.760 --> 00:23:55.770 align:middle line:90% and natural disturbances. 00:23:55.770 --> 00:23:57.990 align:middle line:84% Somehow to have something physical that 00:23:57.990 --> 00:24:00.690 align:middle line:84% generates ideas is more interesting to me 00:24:00.690 --> 00:24:03.480 align:middle line:84% than just an idea that might generate something physical," 00:24:03.480 --> 00:24:05.520 align:middle line:90% end quote. 00:24:05.520 --> 00:24:09.000 align:middle line:84% Smithson also said that my sense of language 00:24:09.000 --> 00:24:10.955 align:middle line:84% is that it is matter and not ideas. 00:24:10.955 --> 00:24:11.955 align:middle line:90% That is, printed matter. 00:24:11.955 --> 00:24:15.090 align:middle line:90% 00:24:15.090 --> 00:24:18.840 align:middle line:84% This is his piece "Printed Matter," Robert Smithson. 00:24:18.840 --> 00:24:21.090 align:middle line:84% Or as Lorine Niedecker has it in a variant 00:24:21.090 --> 00:24:24.530 align:middle line:90% on her poem, thoughts, things. 00:24:24.530 --> 00:24:25.550 align:middle line:90% Thoughts, things. 00:24:25.550 --> 00:24:28.100 align:middle line:84% This is anthropology, different from the thoroughpin 00:24:28.100 --> 00:24:31.550 align:middle line:84% or downright plain topicality of so much nature poetry. 00:24:31.550 --> 00:24:34.170 align:middle line:90% 00:24:34.170 --> 00:24:36.250 align:middle line:90% Half breeds. 00:24:36.250 --> 00:24:36.750 align:middle line:90% Oops. 00:24:36.750 --> 00:24:41.110 align:middle line:90% 00:24:41.110 --> 00:24:43.970 align:middle line:84% I want this to be right there, just-- 00:24:43.970 --> 00:24:45.770 align:middle line:90% section from the talk that cut. 00:24:45.770 --> 00:24:46.820 align:middle line:90% "Half Breeds." 00:24:46.820 --> 00:24:50.150 align:middle line:84% James Thomas Stephens' A Half-Breed's Guide 00:24:50.150 --> 00:24:53.150 align:middle line:84% to the Use of Native Plants negotiates settled, 00:24:53.150 --> 00:24:57.200 align:middle line:84% unsettled survival strategies yet not of the landscape. 00:24:57.200 --> 00:25:01.130 align:middle line:84% His scruffy peas that quote, "keep shallow roots 00:25:01.130 --> 00:25:05.000 align:middle line:84% and break from base, dispersing in danger to flea infestation," 00:25:05.000 --> 00:25:05.990 align:middle line:90% end quote. 00:25:05.990 --> 00:25:10.460 align:middle line:84% Or the false sunflower with a forked tongue, a fertile forked 00:25:10.460 --> 00:25:14.720 align:middle line:84% pistol take note of his tendency to colonize. 00:25:14.720 --> 00:25:17.720 align:middle line:84% The play with diagrams, Latin binomials, 00:25:17.720 --> 00:25:20.480 align:middle line:84% and overall detournement of the field guide format 00:25:20.480 --> 00:25:23.780 align:middle line:84% disperses the tilt of figuration with its romantic and erotic 00:25:23.780 --> 00:25:25.100 align:middle line:90% subtext. 00:25:25.100 --> 00:25:28.100 align:middle line:84% The poems seem wary of colonizing their referent, 00:25:28.100 --> 00:25:30.800 align:middle line:84% looking to plants of the Midwest prairie 00:25:30.800 --> 00:25:33.770 align:middle line:84% for a key to surviving this new old world, 00:25:33.770 --> 00:25:36.170 align:middle line:84% a world that half my blood fought to obtain 00:25:36.170 --> 00:25:39.620 align:middle line:84% and the other half struggled to hold, Stephens writes. 00:25:39.620 --> 00:25:41.420 align:middle line:84% Stephens' series plays ironically 00:25:41.420 --> 00:25:43.430 align:middle line:84% with the frame of the field guide, which 00:25:43.430 --> 00:25:47.690 align:middle line:84% is a genre for going native, but also a taxonomic key that 00:25:47.690 --> 00:25:49.940 align:middle line:84% can serve as shallow sense of ownership. 00:25:49.940 --> 00:25:54.500 align:middle line:84% For Stephens, a poet of Mohawk descent, as for Roger Williams. 00:25:54.500 --> 00:25:57.080 align:middle line:84% A key to the language of America fits no door 00:25:57.080 --> 00:25:59.360 align:middle line:84% between self and other, opening rather 00:25:59.360 --> 00:26:03.170 align:middle line:84% onto self-reflection and complex zones of negotiation. 00:26:03.170 --> 00:26:07.220 align:middle line:84% Here, specific rather than token knowledge use rather than 00:26:07.220 --> 00:26:09.200 align:middle line:84% possession offer the keys to survival. 00:26:09.200 --> 00:26:12.792 align:middle line:90% 00:26:12.792 --> 00:26:16.030 align:middle line:84% Petalism, I'll explain what that is in a second. 00:26:16.030 --> 00:26:20.700 align:middle line:84% The Mesostic Herbarium curated by Alec Finlay, quote, 00:26:20.700 --> 00:26:25.170 align:middle line:84% "A phytological anthology by various amateurs of botany 00:26:25.170 --> 00:26:27.540 align:middle line:84% being a partial heterodox collection 00:26:27.540 --> 00:26:30.690 align:middle line:84% of mesostic poems on the names of flora arranged according 00:26:30.690 --> 00:26:32.730 align:middle line:90% to habitat," end quote. 00:26:32.730 --> 00:26:34.560 align:middle line:84% Founds the movement in arts and letters, 00:26:34.560 --> 00:26:37.560 align:middle line:90% Finlay cheekily dubs Petalism. 00:26:37.560 --> 00:26:39.630 align:middle line:84% And mesostic is-- an acrostic is when 00:26:39.630 --> 00:26:42.040 align:middle line:84% you write to say someone's name down vertically, 00:26:42.040 --> 00:26:45.250 align:middle line:84% and you write lines beginning with the letters of the name 00:26:45.250 --> 00:26:46.020 align:middle line:90% horizontally. 00:26:46.020 --> 00:26:49.890 align:middle line:84% Here, there's a bit more freedom to use any letter in the word. 00:26:49.890 --> 00:26:52.620 align:middle line:90% 00:26:52.620 --> 00:26:55.470 align:middle line:84% There are some exploration of third landscape as places 00:26:55.470 --> 00:27:00.030 align:middle line:84% of succession, transition, invasion, with entries on flora 00:27:00.030 --> 00:27:03.450 align:middle line:84% of the meadow, flora of the hedgerow, flora of the ashes, 00:27:03.450 --> 00:27:05.390 align:middle line:90% exotics, and so on. 00:27:05.390 --> 00:27:07.140 align:middle line:84% It is a wonderful instance of anthropology 00:27:07.140 --> 00:27:10.260 align:middle line:84% and as the play between letter, name, and properties 00:27:10.260 --> 00:27:12.580 align:middle line:84% leaps out with the reading eye down the page. 00:27:12.580 --> 00:27:15.510 align:middle line:90% So here we have dandelion. 00:27:15.510 --> 00:27:20.190 align:middle line:84% Piss the bed, airhead, transient, meadow, parachute, 00:27:20.190 --> 00:27:24.690 align:middle line:90% milky, tick, tocked, perennial. 00:27:24.690 --> 00:27:26.880 align:middle line:84% The letters in the name turned on its axis 00:27:26.880 --> 00:27:28.920 align:middle line:84% become something physical that generates 00:27:28.920 --> 00:27:31.230 align:middle line:84% ideas with their aleatory suggestions 00:27:31.230 --> 00:27:33.870 align:middle line:84% very positioning of words along the stem 00:27:33.870 --> 00:27:35.970 align:middle line:84% and a vertical display of what poet 00:27:35.970 --> 00:27:38.250 align:middle line:84% Anne Carson has called alphabetic edge, 00:27:38.250 --> 00:27:42.070 align:middle line:84% that pictorial outline of the invisible edges of sound. 00:27:42.070 --> 00:27:44.070 align:middle line:84% Additionally, the concrete dimension of the work 00:27:44.070 --> 00:27:47.340 align:middle line:84% foregrounds the fact that writing takes place in space. 00:27:47.340 --> 00:27:50.760 align:middle line:84% Letters draw attention to the eloquence of what they are not. 00:27:50.760 --> 00:27:52.770 align:middle line:84% It is an ambient poetry that could easily 00:27:52.770 --> 00:27:54.870 align:middle line:84% become setting in its own right for a field 00:27:54.870 --> 00:27:59.040 align:middle line:84% of dandelions, recalling the garden work of Finlay's father 00:27:59.040 --> 00:28:01.950 align:middle line:84% who might have set these poems outside in glass, stone, 00:28:01.950 --> 00:28:02.520 align:middle line:90% or wood. 00:28:02.520 --> 00:28:05.940 align:middle line:90% 00:28:05.940 --> 00:28:07.680 align:middle line:90% Kinship with animals. 00:28:07.680 --> 00:28:09.870 align:middle line:90% Not all weeds are plants. 00:28:09.870 --> 00:28:11.670 align:middle line:84% Consider the electric contortions 00:28:11.670 --> 00:28:13.432 align:middle line:84% of Maggie O'Sullivan's "Starlings." 00:28:13.432 --> 00:28:15.390 align:middle line:84% I'm going to play a little bit of history here. 00:28:15.390 --> 00:28:16.360 align:middle line:90% Should be playing. 00:28:16.360 --> 00:28:20.730 align:middle line:90% 00:28:20.730 --> 00:28:22.740 align:middle line:90% "Starlings." 00:28:22.740 --> 00:28:28.860 align:middle line:84% "Lived daily or both, daily the living structuring bone seed. 00:28:28.860 --> 00:28:33.480 align:middle line:84% Pelage aqueous, yonderly lazy bed of need. 00:28:33.480 --> 00:28:38.220 align:middle line:84% Cloud, sand, tipsy, bubbles down deep wonder hoped upon, 00:28:38.220 --> 00:28:41.070 align:middle line:84% grinned, cheers, jeans, note, sermons 00:28:41.070 --> 00:28:45.150 align:middle line:84% in the leading of small and the pitch meander ears, 00:28:45.150 --> 00:28:49.980 align:middle line:84% tune me gold, Dulthie pots, leper, ocher, hauled, 00:28:49.980 --> 00:28:55.440 align:middle line:84% electric contortions clashes perforate, all fall down, 00:28:55.440 --> 00:28:59.790 align:middle line:84% scabbed faulty pedals moaning gether gather. 00:28:59.790 --> 00:29:02.040 align:middle line:84% So it's just a bit of a-- you can hear the whole thing 00:29:02.040 --> 00:29:06.780 align:middle line:84% on PennSound, wonderful archive of poetry recordings online. 00:29:06.780 --> 00:29:09.810 align:middle line:84% Considered as pests in America ever since they escaped 00:29:09.810 --> 00:29:12.990 align:middle line:84% Central Park where they were introduced from England, 00:29:12.990 --> 00:29:17.310 align:middle line:84% O'Sullivan restores starlings their Shakespearean legacy. 00:29:17.310 --> 00:29:20.340 align:middle line:84% As sound, the pitch meander ears, 00:29:20.340 --> 00:29:22.515 align:middle line:90% tune me gold, Dulthie pods. 00:29:22.515 --> 00:29:25.370 align:middle line:90% 00:29:25.370 --> 00:29:28.530 align:middle line:90% As site, they are ochre harled. 00:29:28.530 --> 00:29:30.750 align:middle line:84% Charles Bernstein calls O'Sullivan's poems 00:29:30.750 --> 00:29:32.880 align:middle line:84% a species of collidering and notes 00:29:32.880 --> 00:29:34.710 align:middle line:84% that they lend themselves to recitation 00:29:34.710 --> 00:29:37.320 align:middle line:90% while resisting thematization. 00:29:37.320 --> 00:29:39.990 align:middle line:84% In addition to the changes of font, part of the physical 00:29:39.990 --> 00:29:43.140 align:middle line:84% here is the page, often an active part of the composition 00:29:43.140 --> 00:29:44.850 align:middle line:90% rather than neutral support. 00:29:44.850 --> 00:29:47.130 align:middle line:84% It is one of the things in which O'Sullivan 00:29:47.130 --> 00:29:49.290 align:middle line:90% pursues her thoughts on things. 00:29:49.290 --> 00:29:51.600 align:middle line:84% To carry out the instructions fixed on the page 00:29:51.600 --> 00:29:53.940 align:middle line:84% is a transformative way of discovering 00:29:53.940 --> 00:29:56.880 align:middle line:84% one's objective nature as the breath, the tongue, 00:29:56.880 --> 00:29:59.670 align:middle line:84% and the lips performing Dulthie pods 00:29:59.670 --> 00:30:01.560 align:middle line:90% undergo kinship with animals. 00:30:01.560 --> 00:30:03.110 align:middle line:84% It's a really fun poem to read aloud. 00:30:03.110 --> 00:30:04.402 align:middle line:90% You just feel it in your mouth. 00:30:04.402 --> 00:30:07.500 align:middle line:90% 00:30:07.500 --> 00:30:09.420 align:middle line:84% O'Sullivan's book works and assemblages 00:30:09.420 --> 00:30:12.780 align:middle line:84% emerged from her concern, after shaman artists Kurt Schwitters 00:30:12.780 --> 00:30:14.970 align:middle line:84% and Joseph Beuys, for the retrieval 00:30:14.970 --> 00:30:16.800 align:middle line:90% of potentials within materials. 00:30:16.800 --> 00:30:18.900 align:middle line:84% Her starlings are promiscuous creatures, 00:30:18.900 --> 00:30:22.650 align:middle line:84% shapeshifting mingling, not taxonomic isolates slated 00:30:22.650 --> 00:30:24.630 align:middle line:90% for preservation or extinction. 00:30:24.630 --> 00:30:27.810 align:middle line:84% With them, we move plundering, blundering, 00:30:27.810 --> 00:30:30.960 align:middle line:84% sounding over the castoff materials of English, 00:30:30.960 --> 00:30:33.510 align:middle line:84% our electric contortions colonizing the places 00:30:33.510 --> 00:30:35.970 align:middle line:84% of dialect abandoned by literature, 00:30:35.970 --> 00:30:39.060 align:middle line:84% including many retrievals from James Joyce's own word 00:30:39.060 --> 00:30:40.740 align:middle line:90% hoard "Finnegan's Wake." 00:30:40.740 --> 00:30:42.600 align:middle line:84% The landscape her assemblages engage 00:30:42.600 --> 00:30:45.510 align:middle line:84% is accordingly one of colliding and transformation 00:30:45.510 --> 00:30:47.790 align:middle line:84% rather than separation and preservation, 00:30:47.790 --> 00:30:49.890 align:middle line:90% a weedy cosmopolitan place. 00:30:49.890 --> 00:30:52.740 align:middle line:90% 00:30:52.740 --> 00:30:53.700 align:middle line:90% Just about done here. 00:30:53.700 --> 00:30:55.350 align:middle line:90% "Slug Art." 00:30:55.350 --> 00:30:57.990 align:middle line:84% One might wonder whether the participation of other species 00:30:57.990 --> 00:31:00.240 align:middle line:84% is not more invoked than assured here. 00:31:00.240 --> 00:31:04.230 align:middle line:84% And this is a piece I did with Julie Patton for Ecopoetics. 00:31:04.230 --> 00:31:06.930 align:middle line:84% Can thoughts on things really occur in things 00:31:06.930 --> 00:31:09.810 align:middle line:84% by way of much more than a kind of ventriloquism? 00:31:09.810 --> 00:31:12.210 align:middle line:84% It was perhaps an attempt to push the possibilities 00:31:12.210 --> 00:31:16.020 align:middle line:84% in the face of such skepticism that led to my collaboration 00:31:16.020 --> 00:31:19.260 align:middle line:84% with Julie Patton, some hungry slugs, fallen leaves, 00:31:19.260 --> 00:31:21.750 align:middle line:84% and a silicone information processing machine 00:31:21.750 --> 00:31:23.550 align:middle line:90% in the cyber text "Slug Art." 00:31:23.550 --> 00:31:26.690 align:middle line:90% 00:31:26.690 --> 00:31:31.070 align:middle line:84% Lung sludge, slugs love to give me some skin on the fly. 00:31:31.070 --> 00:31:34.400 align:middle line:84% Glues slug art into make bee leaf 00:31:34.400 --> 00:31:40.340 align:middle line:84% then book the worm slit oral performance space or A, art 00:31:40.340 --> 00:31:45.320 align:middle line:84% of a body moving in B, the space in between intention 00:31:45.320 --> 00:31:50.060 align:middle line:84% to chew lines, save energy, stomach pots. 00:31:50.060 --> 00:31:55.010 align:middle line:84% Lick envelopes, tongue bite words, hours dragging wound. 00:31:55.010 --> 00:32:00.230 align:middle line:84% Not so blunt instrument etching to take scissors to paper. 00:32:00.230 --> 00:32:02.570 align:middle line:84% Attention to qualities within the physical 00:32:02.570 --> 00:32:05.540 align:middle line:84% to intervals between things becomes performance 00:32:05.540 --> 00:32:08.660 align:middle line:84% as space or A, art of a body moving 00:32:08.660 --> 00:32:11.621 align:middle line:90% in B, the space in between. 00:32:11.621 --> 00:32:13.790 align:middle line:84% Between the petals of the rows of the world 00:32:13.790 --> 00:32:16.490 align:middle line:84% move in vertebrates just as the word slug 00:32:16.490 --> 00:32:18.920 align:middle line:84% itself vibrates in Patton's writing 00:32:18.920 --> 00:32:22.760 align:middle line:84% between the registers of garden, print shop, and street. 00:32:22.760 --> 00:32:25.460 align:middle line:84% So there's the invertebrate slug. 00:32:25.460 --> 00:32:28.760 align:middle line:84% There's the printer's slug setting bits of text apart. 00:32:28.760 --> 00:32:31.640 align:middle line:84% And there's also the slug of bang, bang. 00:32:31.640 --> 00:32:33.890 align:middle line:84% She's done a lot of great gardening work in the sort 00:32:33.890 --> 00:32:36.290 align:middle line:90% of inner city in Cleveland. 00:32:36.290 --> 00:32:41.330 align:middle line:84% So to wrap up here, the Third Landscape in the end, 00:32:41.330 --> 00:32:43.610 align:middle line:84% maybe a little more than this in-between space, 00:32:43.610 --> 00:32:47.000 align:middle line:84% this interstitial zone found everywhere life is found 00:32:47.000 --> 00:32:49.460 align:middle line:84% and indeed enabling further life. 00:32:49.460 --> 00:32:52.790 align:middle line:84% The specialist of such a zone, the anthropological decay 00:32:52.790 --> 00:32:56.060 align:middle line:84% givers are also a species of communication, good at shape 00:32:56.060 --> 00:32:59.450 align:middle line:84% shifting, crossing borders and sliding in between. 00:32:59.450 --> 00:33:01.258 align:middle line:84% It is perfectly natural for a poet 00:33:01.258 --> 00:33:03.050 align:middle line:84% as attuned to the present moment of writing 00:33:03.050 --> 00:33:06.980 align:middle line:84% as Joanne Kyger to notice a gray squirrel descending 00:33:06.980 --> 00:33:10.910 align:middle line:84% nose-down tall eucalyptus and to migrate after squirrel 00:33:10.910 --> 00:33:13.940 align:middle line:84% and eucalyptus toward a generational and hemispheric 00:33:13.940 --> 00:33:14.990 align:middle line:90% thought. 00:33:14.990 --> 00:33:18.590 align:middle line:84% She writes, "It is Allen Ginsberg's mesentery squirrel. 00:33:18.590 --> 00:33:21.560 align:middle line:84% Followed me here from Boulder's Naropa campus. 00:33:21.560 --> 00:33:24.320 align:middle line:84% Here to eat the neighbor's introduced Mexican oak, 00:33:24.320 --> 00:33:27.020 align:middle line:84% acorns from Chamula and Chiapas, where 00:33:27.020 --> 00:33:30.170 align:middle line:84% they boycotted the vote in recent elections defying 00:33:30.170 --> 00:33:34.460 align:middle line:84% the ruling PRI party which holds power by deception, repression, 00:33:34.460 --> 00:33:34.985 align:middle line:90% and fraud. 00:33:34.985 --> 00:33:37.640 align:middle line:90% 00:33:37.640 --> 00:33:40.340 align:middle line:84% If poetry can resist the institutionalized profit 00:33:40.340 --> 00:33:43.970 align:middle line:84% is loss of capital, deception, repression, and fraud, 00:33:43.970 --> 00:33:45.770 align:middle line:84% it may be through its special capacity 00:33:45.770 --> 00:33:48.740 align:middle line:84% for attending to the untended as the untended, 00:33:48.740 --> 00:33:51.140 align:middle line:90% essentially leaving it alone." 00:33:51.140 --> 00:33:54.410 align:middle line:84% Thoughts on things that minimize what poet Louis Zukofsky called 00:33:54.410 --> 00:33:57.890 align:middle line:84% the predatory intent of predication. 00:33:57.890 --> 00:33:59.960 align:middle line:84% We might use poetry's care for language 00:33:59.960 --> 00:34:04.900 align:middle line:84% to renew the ancient customs of the Third Landscape. 00:34:04.900 --> 00:34:07.480 align:middle line:84% Let's strike the word weed from our vocabulary, 00:34:07.480 --> 00:34:09.460 align:middle line:84% and begin to attend to all the species 00:34:09.460 --> 00:34:12.130 align:middle line:84% we are binding into our planetary future with whom we 00:34:12.130 --> 00:34:13.810 align:middle line:90% want to travel into the future. 00:34:13.810 --> 00:34:17.380 align:middle line:84% Even Ofelia Zepeda's tumbleweeds that quote, 00:34:17.380 --> 00:34:20.814 align:middle line:84% "roll early into the village dance, semi invited guests." 00:34:20.814 --> 00:34:26.989 align:middle line:90% 00:34:26.989 --> 00:34:30.500 align:middle line:90% So that's thoughts on things. 00:34:30.500 --> 00:34:31.000 align:middle line:90%