Issue One 2011

“Henry David Thoreau, who gave us such remarkable reflections on the natural world as seen on foot or from a canoe, once observed that, “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them” (Fletcher, 26). 

    According to the eminent biologist Ernst Mayr, Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday was celebrated on February 12, 2009 (the same date as Lincoln’s bicentennial), ushered in an “intellectual revolution the impact of which has been greater than the works of Copernicus, Newton and the great physicists of more recent times.”  What made On the Origin of Species such a blockbuster and timely for today’s world?  Even though several of Darwin’s speculations about variation and species have since been modified, his basic discovery of the mechanism of evolution has not changed.  But the real reason for Darwin’s impact even beyond biology, which is what led to Professor Mayr’s estimation of his influence, are his two greatest virtues: keenness of observation and the ability to ask searching questions.  These gifts enabled him, in the process of accumulating a remarkable and vast wealth of material from his research aboard the H.M.S.  Beagle during its five year circumnavigation of the earth, to see or observe these specimens, in a way that, with the exception of the poets I will be discussing, was not only stunningly unique but also intellectually revolutionary.  
    What Darwin saw after hundreds of field trips and note taking mostly along the western coast of South America was that “the fittest survive and if there is genetic variation the race will improve” (Mayr, xv).  This was the theory of natural selection which was so simple, yet so profoundly different from what had been speculated to date about changes in the natural order.  What Darwin did with his observations of the natural world was to overturn–and here is the nuclear explosion of his discovery–western thought since the time of Plato.
    While there were various theories of the creation of species and of evolution in the air by the time Darwin published his theory, none were able to put their finger on the mechanism of natural selection, which was the key to unlocking the mystery of the origin and variation of species.  Ideas for variation among species ranged from the creationist oriented anti-evolutionists, such as then popular readings of the Book of Genesis and the views of British and French scientists Linnaeus and Cuvier, to those of the American, Louis Aggasiz,  and the early British evolutionist theories of Lamarck and Chambers. 
    Not only did Darwin leap over these theorists, but he also arrived at his discovery of natural selection without any reference to or dependence upon the dominant philosophical orientation of the past three hundred years.  Those who preferred typological thinking, which was the vast majority of the learned world at that time, subscribed to the notion explicated in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” “that there are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable ‘ideas’ underlying the observed [world].  This, with the ‘idea’ being the only thing that is fixed and real, [and the natural world having itself] no more reality than the shadows of an object on a cave wall” (Mayr, xix).
    “Population thinking,” however, which is what Darwin’s orientation to the natural world became known as, is “diametrically opposed to the typologist.  The populationist stresses the uniqueness of everything in the organic world.  What is true for the human species, that no two individuals are alike, is equally true for all other species of animals and plants” (Mayr, xx).  In other words, only the diverse individuals of which a population is comprised have “reality.”
    I wonder, if for many of us our personal practice of observing the world around us pre-dates Darwin’s overthrow of Plato.  And here I invite us to share Thoreau’s lament that not many of us actually see what we are looking at, at least not long enough to engage, with childlike wonder, what it might be.  And this is the great contribution of both scientists and artists: they help us see our everyday world with fresh eyes, almost as if the very things we considered ordinary are suddenly new and strange.  
    Why take time to consider how previous generations saw the world?  For one reason, the environment.  The number of Americans who believe climate change is for real has actually decreased according to a recent survey.  If fewer and fewer Americans actually accept climate change we might ask what people do see when they look at the world around them.  Such denial of the physical evidence for warming appears more grounded in an idea like ‘global warming is cyclical and periodic’ than in actual fact.  But the topic is also worth our consideration because it can lead to experiences of the sublime and in so doing restore a sense of wonder and awe to our daily lives which have become overrun by merely functional aims and numbing busyness.
    It has been just about ten years since John Ashbery gave his Norton Lectures at Harvard, published under the title Other Traditions, in which he addressed a group of six not so well known poets to whom he, Ashbery–purportedly the greatest living poet in the English language–turns to jump start his own writing.  The first and most important, to Ashbery, of these poets is John Clare, who lived from 1793 to 1864 and was just a half generation older than Darwin.  In part because of Ashbery’s interest, Clare’s work has been rediscovered and is the subject of major collections, anthologies and academic research.
    Clare was a singularly fascinating figure.  After enjoying a brief fifteen minutes of fame in London, among the literati and patrons of the day, he was left to live out his life in relative poverty in England’s fen country–a land of furrows and fields without the glamour of Wordsworth’s lake district or Walter Scott’s border country.  Clare’s world might be comparable to the less populated areas of central Ohio. 
    An apocryphal story from his boyhood says much about the path his adult life would take.  One day, as a child, he simply set out to find the place where earth and sky meet.  He was convinced if he walked far enough he would find it and discover wonderful things.  The result was that he “lost himself,” so to speak, making his way to the horizon but on the way he noticed field mice, puddles, nests, twigs, loamy soil, and changing sky.  Finally, at dusk, he decided to return home, where his parents, in a panic, had organized a massive search for their son. 
    For the rest of his life Clare never stopped walking for the horizon but his attention remained focused on the things that crossed his path.  If he has one poem on bird nests he has thirty; if he has one poem on birds he has fifty; if he has one poem on trees he has as many as there were kinds of trees in his perambulating realm.  And that’s what makes the poems different–the specific subjects he describes.  Clare, like Darwin, was a very keen observer, tireless in beholding the natural world.  It takes no small stamina, at first, to read Clare on field mice or Darwin, for that matter, on pigeons or Thoreau telling us what he sees as he canoes through the Maine woods.  But if you can get into a kind of Zen mindset what you discover is a description of the natural world that is shaped by the natural world itself rather than an “interpretation” or “conclusion” or using some aspect of the natural world as a metaphor for a particular “point” or “insight.” 
    When these writers are faced with being consistent or coherent they choose consistency and in so doing invite the reader into a personal experience with the world they are describing.  These are writers who are profoundly immersed in the here and now rather than a pre-conceived scheme or plan which so much of modern poetry seems to depend upon.  These writers have the uncanny ability to disconnect from pre-conceived notions about anything and simply watch what happens next.  This kind of observation is driven by what one critic called “diurnal currents”–the patterns and rhythms of the day–and not just those the day but, because in the seasons of the year the days can seem to pile up on one another without much difference, the patterns and rhythms of the seasons.  This is poetry and writing that is profoundly grounded and connected to the earth and it is radically democratic because it depends on the experience and participation of the beholder.  So much poetry today is dependent upon someone’s emotional turmoil or ability to be clever with a turn of phrase and, frankly, doesn’t seem to alleviate but rather adds to the world’s pain.
    Poetry and writing of this kind helps us rediscover the world in which we live–the common, ordinary everyday world.  The world where the ordinary is truly the extraordinary because that is, in fact, the way the world is.  If you happened to see the documentary series “Planet Earth,” the viewer was treated to ten hours of footage of what must have been weeks, if not months, of filming to capture some of the most remarkable scenes of the world’s eco-systems and its inhabitants ever witnessed.  If you wait long enough, if you look long enough, you’ll see an alligator take its prey or a newborn right whale gliding alongside its mother. 
    This is good work.  It takes patience.  It takes commitment.  It takes a discerning eye and mind.  And it rewards richly–ask any birder or flyfisher you know.  These are experiences of the sublime; sublime being a word that comes from a common door frame meaning up to the “limen” or threshold or horizontal bar of the door’s frame.
    There it is–Clare’s horizon where earth and heaven meet, where beauty is to be found.  “Rigor of beauty is the quest” William Carlos Williams said–who found his life filled to the limen, to the sublime describing the seedy, northeast industrial city of Patterson, NJ–its people and buildings and rivers–when his friend Ezra Pound was pleading with him to come see the classic architecture and glories of Europe.
    Thank goodness for Darwin and Clare and their successors.  They left us a rich and rewarding way of living out our days here in the 21st century.  And they offer, I believe, a way of seeing the world that scientists and literary people can agree upon.  A way of seeing that could heal the planet and the lives of those who take the time to see.

Angus Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of the Imagination; Cambridge, Harvard: 2004.
Peter Dizikes, “Our Two Cultures,” from The New York Times Book Review, March 22, 2009
Ernst Mayr from the inroduction to On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin–A facsimile of the first edition; Cambridge: Harvard, 1964.
I am indebted to Fletcher’s work on John Clare and his definition of descriptive poetry with its democratic and diurnal characteristics.  Whitman and Ashbery figure prominently in his assessment of poetry of this kind.