A note from ko shin: when I read this before I am came here, I was quite honest lost. Now I am only lost in the third landscape,hm. This was one of the first we read. Having Jonathan on the staff and talking to him and hearing of his work with weeds, plants, terrain, the oil issue you begin to see we are in a new time folks...the old love "mother" nature is maybe way we are in trouble, we have tried to control her. I hoe you take time to read this. Thanks, k
. Entropology
Attempt imprecision and depth
as a mode of representing the Third landscape.
Gilles Clément
Halfway through writing this essay in early spring in the state of Maine, the Hooded Merganser appeared outside my window, at the ice-cold confluence of the Kennebec River and of Merrymeeting Bay, and brought me this untitled poem by Lorine Niedecker:
Mergansers
fans
o
n their heads
Thoughts on things
fold unfold
abo
ve the river beds (Niedecker 246)
I love a good look at a Hooded Merganser: one far-out bird, with its red eye and flexing white crest—seemingly fleshy until the wind catches and shows the crest’s feathers. (The female sports a shaggier,
red crest.) Whether or not I’ll ever write a merganser poem as good as Niedecker’s, it is love for the beauty of the Hooded Merganser, amongst other things, that moves me to poetry. And I am content to define poetry as “Thoughts on things”—a more succinct version of Charles Olson’s “getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual
as ego … that peculiar presumption by which western man [sic] has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects. For a man is himself an object, whatever he may take to be his advantages …” (“Projective Verse” in Collected Prose 247). Poems “fold unfold” their thoughts—with no predictable aim or intent—“above the river beds.” The instructions they carry out often are as mysterious, or plainly evident,
to heads enjoying them as a merganser’s fan must be to the head of the merganser. And in Niedecker’s poetry, there is a counterweight to “heads”: the bedrock over which rivers bend and pour.
The Hooded Merganser may or may not be around at the end of my lifetime. (Currently it is a species of “least concern” on the endangered
status list, though as endemic to North America, the Hooded Merganser may be less adaptable to climate change than the other five species of mergansers.) Is the beauty of the Hooded Merganser a factor of its relative rarity? Why don’t I feel the same way about the Mallard or the Canada Goose?
I first learned to identify water birds, in fact I sighted my first mergansers, in an abandoned ship and rail yard: an urban nature preserve reclaimed from shipping-to-railway transfer sites in the
10 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
industrial zone of a once prosperous Great Lakes city. Wildlife, I discovered, generally could be found where people weren’t. Still, this place owes its existence to a small group of individuals who cared.
Let’s call extinction a peculiarly biological form of negativity. Even though politicians and pundits now must address climate change (what a difference a political majority makes), few discuss the accelerated extinction of species. Mergansers simply aren’t a factor in the debate.
From the standpoint of a negative dialectics, simply negating the negation of the merganser won’t do much good. “Speaking for” the merganser might alert a few more humans to their enchanting presence in our world. As exemplified in the thriving new market in carbon “offset” indulgences, however, such awareness assimilates too easily to a biocide economy—easing present conscience through investment in potential merganser habitat down the road.
Poet and critic Barrett Watten advocates a critical practice that moves beyond the “perception of the border as negativity and threat; rather, the border … becomes an internal limit within an encompassing whole” (341). How, then, do we internalize the negation
of the merganser? Let me return to Charles Olson’s sense of “objectism.” Humans are themselves objects, Olson asserts: the more we attend to the objecthood of the artifact we are shaping (whether it be a poem, a work of art, a sound composition), as constituted in a field of relations, the more we let ourselves be used, as objects in our own right, by the field in which the object
Jonathan Skinner | 11
participates—i.e. the more we let the demands of the field dictate our choices.
To attend to objects in their relation to a field of objects is then to attend to what artist Robert Smithson called, after Claude Lévi-Strauss, “entropology”:
Today’s artist is beginning to perceive this process of disintegrating frameworks as a highly developed condition. Claude Lévi-Strauss has suggested we develop a new discipline called “Entropology.” The artist
and the critic should develop something similar. The buried cities of the Yucatan are enormous and heterogeneous time capsules, full of lost abstractions, and broken frameworks. There the wilderness and the city intermingle, nature spills into the abstract frames, the containing narrative of an entire civilization breaks apart to form another kind of order. A film is capable of picking up the pieces…. The relationship between pollution and filmmaking strikes me as a worthwhile area of investigation. (“Art Through the Camera’s Eye” 375)1
A broken framework is an interpretative framework (“narrative of a civilization”) objectified. Both Smithson and Olson held their respective romanticisms in regards to a continuum of dedifferentiated
“matter” or a field of discrete and immanent “objects.” In
1 | Lévi-Strauss’s coinage comes near the very end of Tristes Tropiques: “The world began without man and will end without him…. But far from this part according man an independent position … he himself appears as perhaps the most effective agent working towards the disintegration of the original order of things and hurrying on powerfully organized matter towards ever greater inertia…. Every verbal exchange, every line printed, establishes communication between people, thus creating an evenness of level, where before there was an information gap and consequently a greater degree of organization. Anthropology could with advantage be changed into ‘entropology,’ as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of this process of disintegration.” (413-414)
12 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
either case, creation as applied force entails negation; production entails neglect. (As landscapist Gilles Clément notes: “All management
generates an abandoned area” 15). To paraphrase Smithson, the relationship between pollution and poetry might bear some investigating. In his study of urban “development,” City Eclogues, poet Ed Roberson phrases it in terms of the human cost:
Their buildings razed. they ghosts
their color that haze of plaster dust
their blocks of bulldozed air opened to light … People lived where it weren’t open,
a people whose beginning is disbursed
by a vagrant progress,
whose settlement
is overturned for the better
of a highway through to someone else’s
possibility. (“The Open” 62-63)
An entropology seeks a better balance between production and neglect—in the case of writing, between forcing the right conjunction
of sound, image and idea, and somehow letting the words be;2 in the case of conceptualization, between developing and disintegrating
frameworks; and in the case of ethics, between someone’s possibility, and, as Roberson might put it, “someone or something
2 | Between what used to be called “closed” and “open” forms.
Jonathan Skinner | 13
else’s possibility.” (The genesis of the title of Marshall McLuhan’s book, The Medium is the Massage, in the stet on a typographer’s error, is an excellent case in point. Thoreau’s “Useful Ignorance,” in the essay “Walking,” is another: “We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense” [215]). Robert Creeley, in “A Sense of Measure,” called this “the intelligent ability to recognize the experience of what is so given” (487). In the realm of art, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, sinking into and emerging from the salty bath of its lake, exhibits an entropological balance between form and process, idea and materials, production and neglect.
In an interview, Smithson described his artworks as “entropic situations
that hold themselves together. It’s like the Spiral Jetty is physical
enough to withstand all these climate changes, yet it’s intimately involved with those climate changes and natural disturbances… . Somehow to have something physical that generates ideas is more interesting to me than just an idea that might generate something physical” (298). We should be less sanguine than Smithson, nowadays, about our capacity for creating artifacts capable of “withstanding” climate
change. Yet it might be for lack of Smithson’s kind of attention to physical processes, over time, that our awakening to the scale of climate change, no longer merely a “natural disturbance,” seems so sudden. It should go without saying that the progression of thoughts in an entropology is not straightforward, thus the form of inherence will more closely resemble a spiral than a forcefully applied line.
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The unspoken emphasis I hear in Niedecker’s poem is “thoughts on things in things.” As things in their own right, thoughts on things “fold unfold/ above the river beds.” (A variant of the poem has “thoughts, things” [440-441].) The folding and unfolding of these thoughts, their opening into letters, words, lines, poems and pages in books, along with the merganser all subject to the attrition
of entropy, is the “thinking with things as they exist” that poet Louis Zukofsky identified as a stance implicit in the poetics of the Objectivist group, amongst which Niedecker would be included (“An Objective,” Prepositions 12).
Perhaps the rhyme of Niedecker’s “beds” nails too squarely on the “heads” of the mergansers. However, the word “beds” has the advantage of combining with “folds” to tilt the poem into a geological
register of folds and beds, and even toward a sense of the geological age of the merganser. (Lophodytes cucullatus, the only member of its genus, appears to be closely related to a fossil duck from the Late Pleistocene of Vero Beach, Florida, Lophodytes floridanus. The merganser’s serrated teeth recall the serrated bills found in fossil birds such as the cormorant-like Hespornis and, of course, the Archaeopteryx.) Condensed into the image of river beds might be the clarity of the water, and the fact that mergansers,
who hunt by sight, prefer calm, clear water. As always, in a Niedecker poem, careful teasing brings out a multitude of condensed worldly ramifications. And also as characteristically, important correspondences sit right on the surface: heads on beds are thoughts on things.
Jonathan Skinner | 15
The word “thoughts” is literally stacked on “things”—and Niedecker’s variant shows her tending toward apposition in her placement of these words—in the ontological sense of “printed matter,” as Smithson would have it (if not in the more directly concrete sense of a “heap of matter”): “my sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas—i.e., ‘printed matter’” (61). In her letting the words be, without too much predication or prepositional articulation, Niedecker composes, like Smithson’s stacked similes for language, “something physical that generates ideas.”
These ideas aren’t an image at the expense of sound, nor sound at the expense of image. They are “thoughts [on] things” implicating us in the rhythms of mergansers on the river: we share in the vulnerability of mergansers, just as we might imagine they pick up on the powerful gathering together and unveiling of our intellects. And we depend on one another for the mutual unfolding of our attributes. (This includes
housekeeping ethics: if we muck up their rivers, no amount of
16 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
Illustration 1 | “Language to be Looked At,” The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (104). Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
intellectual brilliance, on our part, will keep the mergansers around.) If there is a metaphysics to Niedecker’s poem, it would have to be something like Leibniz’s monadology: “A soul can read in itself only what is distinctly represented there; it cannot unfold all its folds at once” (“The Monadology,” Prop. 61. Philosophical Essays 221).
This is entropology, different from the troping, or downright plain topicality, of so much nature poetry. (Nature as a “topic” can only be the starting point for poetry. And while a poetics can never escape figuration, we do well to distrust metaphor as the sole basis for an ecopoetics. While feeling like may be a vital part of an ethical relation
to other-than-humans, it is not a sufficient condition.) Beyond singing about, or singing like, entropology brings us somewhat closer to what the Mayan poet Humberto Ak’abal or the Bosavi Kaluli singer Ulahi must mean, when they say they work out of a tradition of singing with the other-than-human (Ak’abal; Feld 13).
IIII
.
Third Landscape
Raise indecision to the level of politics.
Let it be a counterweight to power.
Gilles Clément
If we are to believe the late Stephen Meyer, and the theory of island biogeography as he sets it forth in his last book The End of the Wild, the battle for the biodiversity of the current geological period is lost:
Jonathan Skinner | 17
Over the next 100 years or so as many as half of the Earth’s species,
representing a quarter of the planet’s genetic stock, will either completely or functionally disappear. The land and the oceans will continue to teem with life, but it will be a peculiarly homogenized assemblage of organisms naturally and unnaturally selected for their compatibility with one fundamental force: us. Nothing—not national or international laws, global bioreserves, local sustainability schemes, nor even “wildlands” fantasies—can change the current course. The path for biological evolution is now set for the next million years. And in this sense “the extinction crisis”—the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today—is over, and we have lost. (4-5)
Alfred Russell Wallace (Darwin’s rival and collaborator) theorized that the number of species on the planet today is directly related to the number of what he called “realms,” or biogeographical regions. Species that were related on the “pangaea” supercontinent have diverged genetically over the millennia that they were separated by migration and continental drift (see Wallace’s 1876 volume, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, excerpted in Lomolino et al, 164-177). Thus, in addition to fragmenting habitat, human activity today, as Gilles Clément puts it, “accelerates the process of encounter
leading to Pangaea, diminishing the number of realms and, consequently, the number of species” (24-25). As for the oceans, sinkhole for industrial civilization’s entropic cascade of energy, fished right down the food web, scientists refer to a “rise of slime,” as primordial organisms regain the upper hand they enjoyed a half billion years ago, at the dawn of evolution (Weiss, “Altered Oceans: A Primeval Tide of Toxins”). The “weedy” species—the species most like us—will inherit the earth, reknitting Pangaea and reversing 65-million years of evolution.
18 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
According to poet Christopher Dewdney, this is an opportunity for time travel: “The continued use of fossil fuels has released countless side-effects unknown to mankind … to slowly replace the present composition of the atmosphere with the chemical composition of the atmosphere some 200 million years ago” (The Natural History 38).3 Such travel unsettles much common sense about “nature.” According to Clément, for instance, we should think about plants in terms of travel, not fixity (his volume on weeds is titled In Praise of Vagabonds). When in The Maximus Poems he meditates on biogeography,
Olson seems to agree:
Migration in fact (which is probably
as constant in history as any one thing: migration
is the pursuit by animals, plants & men of a suitable
—and gods as well—& preferable
environment; and leads always to a new center.
(The Maximus Poems, Vol. III 565)
“This,” Olson added, “is the rose is the rose is the rose of the World.” At about the same time that Smithson was busting art out of the gallery, Olson was chafing at the limits of the page, and wrote these lines in a spiral, an enfolded rose whose outermost petal is “migration”
and innermost petal finds “the world” (479):
3 | Dewdney’s The Natural History stands out as an exploration of erotics in landscape beyond the certitudes of time and space so often used to anchor “self.” Neither reference nor simile are major modes of the poem, as it yields to the kind of othering even the most everyday of landscapes can impose, when closely attended to. For a contemporary equivalent, I can think only of Eleni Sikelianos’s The California Poem, and perhaps some of the work discussed below.
Jonathan Skinner | 19
In arguing that the battle for the biodiversity of the current geological
period is lost, Meyer is not arguing that the battle for biodiversity is
lost, period. Rather, he advocates that we drop “the haphazard strat-
20 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
Illustration 2 | “Migration in fact,” Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (479). Image
courtesy of Charles Olson Fonds, Contemporary Literature Collection, Special
Collections/Rare Books Division, Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University.
egy of protecting some relic and ghost species” and begin to think about trans-regional schemes for “the preservation and protection of huge swaths of landscape and seascape … selected to protect broad ecosystem functions and processes in a dynamic environment rather than species-specific needs” (74, 81-82). Perhaps the fold to pursue, then, in Niedecker’s “thoughts on things,” is not the very peculiar “hooded” phenomenology of the merganser so much as its ecological connection with “river beds,” and slow clear waters, as a species that hunts by sight.4
More than ever before, humans are now directly implicated in the survival of other species; we cannot try to save everything and will have to make some difficult choices. Most of all, we will have to be inventive. “We need and are perhaps beginning to find,” wrote Raymond Williams, “different ideas, different feelings, if we are to know nature as varied and variable nature, as the changing conditions
of a human world” (“Ideas of Nature” 85). Or as the other Williams, William Carlos, noted:
Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
4 | In his Bibliography on America: for Ed Dorn, Charles Olson famously claimed, “one saturation job, and you’re in—for life.” Ecological connections (such as those between mergansers and clear water) demand what I call the “biome saturation job.” In ecology-speak a “group of ecosystems that are related by having a similar type of vegetation governed by similar climatic conditions” is a “biome” (Nebel and Wright 668). Rather than pick an author or school or historical period for one’s poetic dissertation, I am suggesting that aspiring poets might profitably pick a biome. To become a poet for mergansers might entail a “biome saturation job” on wetlands.
Jonathan Skinner | 21
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness: without invention
nothing lies under the witch-hazel
bush, the alder does not grow from among
the hummocks margining the all
but spent channel of the old swale…
(Paterson, “Sunday in the Park” 50)
In her essay on the blackberry, “Rubus Armeniacus: A Common Architectural Decorative Motif in the Temperate Mesophytic Region,” poet Lisa Robertson looks to the “illegitimate, superfluous” bramble—nowadays considered a “minor invasive alien,” though introduced to North America deliberately in the 19th century—for lessons in “soft architecture.” “Tracing a mortal palimpsest of potential surfaces in acutely compromised situations, Rubus,” she writes, “shows us how to invent” (130).
Clément sees “acutely compromised situations,” neither cultivated nor preserved, such as the abandoned lots, edges of forests, margins of roads and rivers, unplowable corners of fields, that are quickly taken over by weedy, ranging pioneer species, as sites of potential rather than privation—he urges we recognize them with the term “Third landscape.” These undecided landscapes can be sanctuaries for diversity, he argues: “Third landscape refers to third estate (and
22 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
not to third world). Space expressing neither power nor submission to power. It refers to the pamphlet of Sieyès in 1789: ‘What is the third estate? —Everything. What has it accomplished up to now? —Nothing. What does it aspire to become? —Something’” (13).
As the “reservoir of all the planet’s genetic configurations,” the Third landscape “represents the biological future,” and is the “privileged site for biological intelligence: the aptitude for constant self-reinvention” (30, 66). Abandoned sites are critical for facilitating and understanding
the survival strategies of other species and the migrations (the “ways of nature”) that lead to new centers of speciation.
In the entropology of globalization, all management generates abandoned spaces: the overgrown farm-fields and grubbed-up orchards spawned by EU tariff-quota regimes, the vacant lots of urban sprawl, the unvisited swamps inside the motorway cloverleaf (Clément 15). All creation as applied force entails negation; all production entails neglect.5 From the standpoint of the Third landscape,
diversity takes refuge in these abandoned spaces, spiraling back in. “I can begin to find refuge in change,” wrote Terry Tempest Williams (178). Or Christopher Dewdney:
5 | By “neglect,” I do not believe Clément means “waste.” An “abandoned space” is not the same thing as a dump or an unremediated “superfund site”: the capture of industrial “waste” such sites provide groups them with the spaces of production. I reserve the designation “entropic” for properly “neglected” spaces, which are not the spaces most directly targeted by industrial civilization’s entropic energy cascades: such terminal sites are in fact areas of super-abundant growth, “eutrophic” zones of over-nutrition that usually favor one or a few simple, swift-“blooming” species. Ocean ecosystems are collapsing because of our persistent failure to see them as spaces of
Jonathan Skinner | 23
… Nighthawks,
crickets, bats and raccoons, unbroken
wild continuum into the centres
of the great-lake cities. (The Natural History 56)
“Entropology” includes the study in words of entropy at work on a fractured continuum from words to things. It is thoughts on things in things. Though not the subject of this essay, William Carlos Williams’s poetry—in its studies of urban trees like sycamores, of vacant lots shining with broken glass and of the new constructions on American dialect—moves consistently toward an entropology. It is fitting that Smithson would have adopted Williams (who was the family doctor) as a kind of spiritual father.
The Third landscape can offer critical corridors and buffer zones—the only hope for species seeking to dodge the fate of their islanded biogeography and propagate out of fragmented habitat. Often, the wildness of such lands is but a temporary stay, reprieved for a time
24 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
5 | production—as they receive the effluent of an industrial human scale, truly oceanic in its own right (see “Altered Oceans”). And even while we continue to speak of the oceans as “wild,” we fail to treat them with the care granted many other “wild” spaces on the planet: while most human societies gave up hunting wild animals for subsistence long ago, we continue to hunt animals on a massive scale in the oceans (even “farmed” fish are fed pellets made from wild-caught menhaden, sardines and anchovies). Additionally, liquid ecosystems have their own properties that confound ordinary notions of “landscape.” Much of what is said here, then, regarding Third landscape can be applied to ocean spaces only in the most limited sense. Conversely, the importance of the oceans to the evolutionary ladder, to the thermodynamic cycle and to the food chain on a planetary scale—not to speak of the wetlands dimension of most terrestrial landscapes—should make for some skepticism regarding Clément’s optimistic campaign for Third landscapes.
by political, bureaucratic, financial delay. This wildness basically has the status of grass growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk.
Jonathan Skinner | 25
Illustration 3 | “Ten Metaphors in Space,” Cecilia Vicuña, Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water (19). Image used by permission of the artist.
In his prose-poetic Natural History of Trees, John Perlman devotes a few entries to urban trees, including the infamous Ailanthus: “rock bursts into bloom sun alights on twigleaf igniting seed … a sham souvenir of stone-blighted blooms at windows citywide … underfoot thru magma to china sunward west east barebranch portals a mortal” (“TREE OF HEAVEN (Ailanthus altissima)”).6 Peter Larkin, in his meditation on “Urban Woods” (discussed at further length below), notes that, in fact, urban trees can be too protected—from the kind of grazing and competition that would promote lateral movement: “Road paving throws up tree regime. The feed-packs are occasional puncture with nil runoff, traffic impermeable
once under leaf cover.// city grazing less a tree’s/ enemy than its appealed/ irritant” (66).
Clément points out that the official “designation” of Third landscapes,
as heritage “preserves,” inevitably subtracts from their status as Third landscape. He also notes, however, that institutional abandonment of the Third landscape does not signify total abandonment:
“the non-institutional use of the Third landscape partakes
in the oldest of spatial customs” (57). Presumably Clément is alluding to the traditions of the “commons,” to sustainable sharing of resources that resists the (il)logic of capitalist extraction. As a “spatial custom” he may be thinking of Lefebvre’s “spatial practice,”
6 | Barrett Watten sees the “cunning of capitalist unreason, the conditions of its reproduction” in “zones of disuse and unprofitability as particularly motivated … the negativity of profit as loss” (348). Witness the fate of many of New York City’s Lower East Side “pocket gardens” under the Giuliani administration, or the current “millennial” redevelopment of downtown Detroit.
26 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
or of DeCerteau’s connection of “the practice of the everyday” with “walking rhetorics” and “phatic topoi.”
A poetics such as I have outlined, however sketchily, as “entropology,”
or “thoughts on things in things,” attentive to a balance between production and neglect, may be particularly suited to the non-institutional use of the Third landscape Clément calls for. At the very least, students of the Third landscape might attend to how they are developing it in their uses of reference and of metaphor. Can the grass share the space between the cracks with our metaphors that so constantly ply the interstices between words and things?
IIIIIIIII
. In Weeds is the Preservation
of the World
What is a weed?
A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the scale of desirability, opposite threatened species, we find weeds: rabbit, Colorado potato beetle, African mosquito, cactus moth, elm bark beetle, European starling, North American muskrat,
cord-grass, giant African land snail, sea lamprey, Chinese mitten
crab, zebra mussel, purple loosestrife, pampas grass, buffelgrass, garlic mustard, Asian tamarisk, caulerpa, Africanized honeybee, Argentine ant, Asian long-horned beetle, European gypsy moth, fire ant, bighead carp, northern snakehead, Asian swamp eel, brown
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tree snake, nutria, house sparrow, Japanese knotweed, marijuana, kudzu, common reed, Norway maple, Russian olive, tree of heaven, ice plant, datura, water hyacinth, giant salvinia, mynas, goat, cane toad, leafy spurge, cat, nile perch, comb jelly, house mouse, flatworm,
Amur river clam, mesquite, tumbleweed, red-vented bulbul, gray squirrel, fox, Australian paperbark tree, empress tree, mallard, mosquito fish, water chestnut, giant hogweed …
What is a weed? In the “Weeds” poem of his final completed sequence,
80 Flowers (a collaboration with Celia Zukofsky, who did the gardening), Louis Zukofsky takes on the question: “Founderous wilding weeds endear paradise/ … smallhead bluecurls blue-wool’d romero defer-ah/ bamboo-such downyrattlesnake pact is pubescence/ feed talk bananas great maulin’/ … goldenrod solid-day go ponder otter …” (Complete Short Poetry 350)7 80 Flowers ties energy up in concentrated knots of allusion: in her book-length reading of the poem, Michele Leggott teases out, over several pages, the John Adams celebration of cultivation, rather than wilderness, condensed into “founderous wilding weeds endear paradise” (Reading 304-317). But in addition to condensation, to borrow from Leggott’s argument on Zukofsky’s “late poetic,” the poems are constantly
7 | Is “founderous” (fundus) an allusion to Shakespeare’s Bottom? On the one hand, weeds “endear” paradise, are anathema to the highly cultivated, metafloristic
80 Flowers, as contrary to them as “wilding” is to garden (in dear paradise)—where entropy only enters the picture as the reader untangles the intertwined allusions. Indeed, weeds are a form of “bottoming out.” (Zukofsky had discovered
“founderous” in the Autobiography of John Adams—as what causes something
to founder.) On the other hand, they have their own wild needs that can only endure paradise. It may even be the case that “wildings,” cultivars found in the wild, are like an extension of paradise beyond the garden walls.
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feeding, and being fed by, “contingencies’ flowers”—“those places where one voice had been, or seemed to have been, listening to another”
(55). The aureate music inside these lines emerges, via phonetic
transliteration (the “homophonic translation” method Louis and Celia Zukofsky deployed in their Catullus) of the Latinate terms for some of the “weeds” they explore: bambusa (bamboo) in “bamboo-such,” Epicactus pubescens (downy rattlesnake plantain) in “rattlesnake pact is pubescence,” Solidago (goldenrod) in “solid-day go,” Ipomoea pandurata (bindweed) in “ponder otter.”
If condensation is the centripetal force of these poems, gathered into five words per line (five being the most common number of petals in flowers) and eight lines per poem, the poems flee their centers on contingencies: sonic horizons that accumulate a persistent sound of history (Leggott 56). Thus pandurata (“ponder otter”) leads to pandura, a three-stringed musical instrument invented by the god Pan, which Leggott speculates may have suggested “otter,” via that animal’s Latin name, Lutra: “goldenrod solid-day go ponder otter.” The line may offer a Thoreauvian injunction to go to the pond when goldenrod flowers and the bindweed runs, these solid days of July and August, to ponder the otter: “How retired an otter manages to live! He grows to be four feet long without any mortal getting a glimpse of him” (Journal, 30 Jan. 1854). Or it may be something else.
To read 80 Flowers, by ear as well as by eyes and mind, with books and reference works at hand, is to enjoy a rhythm of expansion and contraction—pursuing rhizomatic contingencies of meaning, away from any evident center, and returning to the formal reproduction
Jonathan Skinner | 29
of meanings condensed into the seeds of words: entropic situations that hold themselves together. For the Zukofskys, “weeds dress earth” (in “Wild Geranium”) as much as any human flowers garb gardens: Louis and Celia could hardly in good faith ignore the unruly, insubordinate,
self-willed nature of these “wildings.” Grasses, edibles and medicinals contribute to this poetry of knowledge. Thus a harvest of weeds, “ascending tansy field-bindweed lady’s-orchid-slipper foison,” makes for one of the pleasures of 80 Flowers. Such pleasure and knowledge is especially concentrated in the weedy cluster of flowers halfway through the sequence, including Queen Anne’s Lace (“top-turfy gimp fiery oes eyes”), Chicory, and Dandelion (“madding sun mixen seeded rebus”) (Complete Short Poetry 331, 339-340).
According to the Dictionary (American Heritage, 3rd Edition), a weed is “a plant considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome,
especially one growing where it is not wanted, as in a garden.” Meaning number three is “the leaves or stems of a plant as distinguished
from the seeds.” The word appears to be derived from the Old English weod, herb, grass, weed. Adventitious and asexual, weeds such as grass reproduce rhizomatically, through leaves and stems (and tubers) not seeds, bypassing a centralized reproductive system accessible to the breeder’s shaping hands. Obviously it is the notion of “undesirability” that has permitted extending the designation to species other than plants. Weeds are nature ungirded, beyond the germ and girth of the gardener’s yard—the negation of enclosure (see the family of words clustering around the Indo-European root gher-1). From the standpoint of weeds, even “wilderness areas” are a type of human gardening.
30 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
But another definition of weed is as a specialist of disturbed areas, or as the parasite on an ecosystem’s more dominant species, a scavenger
on the leavings of civilization. Here weeds would seem to be disliked precisely because of their supposed dependency on us; in their opportunism they are too much like us, and so cannot teach us about being “wild and free.” Wherever you find humans, pigeons and mice and rats and cockroaches and purple loosestrife are not far behind: they are our “footprints,” the ubiquitous trace of our heavy touch, registering ecological imbalance.
From an ecological standpoint, however, weeds are a necessary part of the healing process. They are the first species to wager their genes in a disturbed area—the pioneers. How ironic to shun them for supposed
“dependency.” It may be the summit of arrogance to look on these species we are associated with only as passive followers, rather than, in the evolutionary scheme of things, seeing ourselves as the followers, the helpers, the hosts.8 In any case, styling weeds after our domestic relationships blinds (and binds) us to their nature.
What if the wild, rather than offering a logocentric origin for human
being, were simply where humans are not? Not the birthplace of our species or the final frontier, where humans came from or
8 | Ethnobotanists have speculated that our somewhat mysterious relationship with psychotropic plants and fungi may be an instance of coevolutionary adaptation: we get high and the weed gets a free ride. The same may go for some edible plants (see Gary Nabhan, “Sandfood” in Gathering the Desert). While our relatively recent arrival on the evolutionary timeline makes this unlikely—it is more likely insects played a role in the evolution of alkaloids in vascular plants and fungi—we cannot deny that weeds get a lot out of us.
Jonathan Skinner | 31
where we are are heading, but where humans are not (or are no longer).
More and more, the “wild” flourishes in places where humans have been—in abandoned, “post-human” places.9
There are places where people are not and there are times when people are not: one might speak, in regards to cities, of the “wilderness”
of the night, a time dominated by the life of feral creatures and their associates:
Trees, that spin theiyr seeds on inhuman looms. Night flowers
violated by the long tongues of bats. Perfumes, orchestrated
rivers inscribed on the wings of moths.
A host of false moons,
the outskir
ts of the city.
(Chr
istopher Dewdney, Predators of the Adoration 35)
The wild might be right under our noses: more likely there, than in designated “wilderness areas.” I first met the Hooded merganser not in the “back of the beyond” but along a quiet stretch of a relatively
tame river, one that only eight years ago was so polluted one wouldn’t swim there. Paradoxically, the window hiding me from the merganser allowed me to see it.
Thoreau says that “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.” (As
9 | Taking “wildness” as distinct from “wilderness,” which is more narrowly defined by its ability to sustain a maximal range of trophic levels, all the way up to the big, man-eating predators. Grizzlies, cougars and wolves are so managed, tagged and radio collared, that ironically they may be less “wild” than cockroaches—if by “wild” we mean to indicate a degree of autonomy.
32 | Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape
one meaning of “wild,” the OED has “Not under, or not submitting to, control … unruly, insubordinate, wayward, self-willed.”) Thoreau also connects the “Wild” with inexorable and manifest colonial destiny:
“The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends forth its fibres in search of the Wild” (“Walking” 206-207). The wild is space, freedom, suitable
conditions for growth. It impels the migration Olson writes of, the “pursuit by animals, plants & men of a suitable/ —and gods as well—& preferable/ environment.”
Both writers acknowledge the predatory, colonizing nature of life itself: life sends forth its fibres in search of the most alive. We seldom think of the creatures that come to devour us in the night—as in Christopher Dewdney’s chant of the primitive sublime:
Because it is a huge and silent underwater predator.
Because it is huge and primitive.
Because it cruises, hovering, long snouted crocodilian.
Because it is primitive.
(“Gr
id Erectile,” The Natural History 88)
Or as in—at the other end of the spectrum—Annie Dillard’s famous
description of a frog being eaten by a giant water bug (5-7).
By turns index of autonomous wildness and index of an all-too-human landscape, weeds embody the contradictions in our relationship
to “nature.” As the preferred habitat of weeds, the Third landscape, like Olmsted’s unkempt Central Park in the 1970s for
Jonathan Skinner | 33
Robert Smithson, is a “carrier of the unexpected and of contradiction”
(“Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape” 119). Rather than the First landscapes of pastoral fantasy, this landscape of weeds seems an appropriate site for the entropology of a poetics radically, and rhizomatically, open to the flowers of contingency.
IV
. Poetries of the Third Landscape
Consider boundaries as a thickness rather than a line.
Gilles Clément
In the city of brotherly love, the purple, sweet blossoms of the royal paulownia, or empress tree, festoon a mile-long stretch of fenced-off viaduct, a wild oasis suspended above the decaying urban core (an expressway border vacuum just opposite Chinatown): “never to alight till nations sue for peace seedpods for excelsior stuffing crates of cathay porcelain castaways in shiphold broadcast over foreign soils” (John Perlman, “ROYAL PAULOWNIA (Paulownia tomentosa)
Along the Hudson,” n.p.). Perlman’s prose poem alludes to the “non-native” status of these fast-growing trees, whose seed pods came over as packing for Chinese porcelain. Traditionally, Chinese families plant an empress tree at the birth of a daughter, to be harvested
for dowry furniture when she is married. Paulownia trees currently
enjoy a strong market in Japan. Wherever we find plants we find culture: the empress trees seem to have known where they were going, when they chose this abandoned railway bed convenient to Chinatown. A recent visit to the site uncovered evidence of selective cutting—perhaps some kind of “non-institutional use.”
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Jonathan Skinner | 35
Illustration 4 | Reading Viaduct, Philadelphia, photo © J. Skinner
Peter Larkin’s many-minded phenomenology of trees from the perspective of leaves, Leaves of Field, offers an astonishing entropology
in its up-ending of grammatical (and arboreal) hierarchy, as if language were to be seen from the point of view of its words. The section of the book titled Open Woods, which moves in three parts from “Urban Woods” through “Ancient Woods” to “Opening Woods,” ends with a meditation in prose and in verse on the Third landscape of secondary woodland (87-88). Reading Larkin is like guessing topography from canopy, and entails inventing a whole new method. Here the trunks of sentences seem to hang from their qualifying canopies, grammatical subjects depend on their predicates:
“The composing process of secondary woodland does overstay when it rewrites the profile of pre-clearance vegetation” (81).
A major portion of the research for this essay was conducted on a fellowship
with the Center for Humanities at Temple University (CHAT). Thanks are due to Richard Immerman, Jena Osman, and others at CHAT who supported this work.
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