{"id":15066,"date":"2016-05-23T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2016-05-23T16:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=15066"},"modified":"2019-09-11T02:48:22","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T06:48:22","slug":"poetry-produces-the-novel-language-of-future-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2016\/05\/23\/poetry-produces-the-novel-language-of-future-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Produces the Novel Language of Future Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City.<\/strong> 2000. Edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis. ISBN: 1571314105. 265 pages. Buy the book.<\/a><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

How can poems advance our understanding of nature in cities? If cities themselves are ecosystems of people, nature, and infrastructure, it follows that these elements can<\/em> coexist in a balance that yields sustainable, livable, resilient, and just outcomes, even if that synergy is not evident in cities of the world today. Poetry, with its capacity to invert the lexicons of \u201cnature\u201d and \u201cculture\u201d so that they are not artificially divided per our current paradigms, is uniquely positioned to play a role in visioning such cities. By playing words, phrases, sensory evocations, and ideas off each other that would, in the prose discourse of practitioners, remain separate, poetry allows us to discover our future cities through the act of description.<\/p>\n

A parking lot can be more than a parking lot. A rusting ship can be more than a symbol of decay. \u201cNature\u201d encompasses more than a pristine, vegetated space untouched by human influence.<\/blockquote><\/figure>\n

At its most novel<\/em>, this is how Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City<\/em>, edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, engages readers. The collection, organized around several themes, occasionally manages to subvert the built vs. natural environment dichotomy, allowing the inextricability of wildlife, landscape, infrastructure, and people to manifest as an emergent property of city life.<\/p>\n

Take Carter Revard\u2019s piece, \u201cChristmas Shopping\u201d. The author describes a prosaic scene\u2014pulling into a parking lot near sunset in St. Louis, on a mission to buy Christmas gifts, but emerging unsuccessfully. Where is \u201cnature\u201d here? In another poem, even another poem in this collection, \u201cnature\u201d might have been the suffocated vegetation, mercilessly paved over to make way for a decaying strip mall; the ubiquitous parking lot gulls tussling over a strip of plastic bag; the iridescent shimmer of puddles, a reminder of misplaced fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

Instead, Revard catalogues \u201cnature\u201d quite differently:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2014nothing was ordinary; it seemed
\nwe\u2019d floated up into the sunset air all
\nfilled with gold and dark shining, like
\nbeing in a cathedral with the moon\u2026\u201d
\n\u2014Carter Revard<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the subset of poems that looks optimistically on the influence of nature in cities, each author chooses<\/em> to characterize nature in cities unconventionally.<\/p>\n

\"cover\"For example, in Carolyn Miller\u2019s meditation on the unity of things, people sleep \u201clike bees packed in a hive\u201d as, \u201cout on the edge\/of land, the ocean rocks and shifts and folds\u201d. Miller draws an emotional connection between people and bees, all simultaneously sleeping in the hive of the city. Likewise, X. J. Kennedy describes pieces of ships in both human and natural terms: the masts become \u201cmechanical conifers\u201d that \u201credden slow as leaves\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the case of \u201cChristmas Shopping\u201d, Revard chooses to see (and say) that \u201cnothing was ordinary\u201d, interrupting his own stream of attempts to describe the scene with this simple message to the reader: a parking lot can be more than a parking lot. Bees and humans share fundamental behaviors. A rusting ship can be more than a symbol of decay. \u201cNature\u201d encompasses more than a pristine, vegetated space untouched by human influence. \u201cNature\u201d in cities does is not only decimated.<\/p>\n

This is rather a radical proposition for a poet to make, requiring both an open mindedness on the reader\u2019s part and a verisimilitude in the writer\u2019s drawing together of human with natural elements. Based on the binaries with which modern society inculcates us, it is easier to think that nature and cities are diametrically opposed than it is to seek their mutual resonances\u2014hence the relative dearth of anthologies dealing with nature and <\/em>cities.<\/p>\n

Indeed, I could find only one<\/a> such collection released since \u201cUrban Nature\u201d was published in 2000, relative to the numerous compilations of eco- and urban poetry available today. Even in Urban Nature<\/em> it is evident that editor Laure-Anne Bosselaar has artfully arranged the collection, managing to highlight the idea of nature in urban contexts while including poems that were not necessarily written to address that theme, and introducing a few household names\u2014Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, Philip Levine\u2014to bolster the appeal of many critically acclaimed, but lesser-known poets.<\/p>\n

After all, to succumb to the notion of cities as the locations of poignant juxtapositions\u2014filth with luxury, gluttony with poverty\u2014is almost inadvertent, because these are the cities that we already know<\/em>. But placing \u201cnature\u201d and \u201ccities\u201d on opposite ends of a spectrum oversimplifies the rich, chaotic reality of nature in<\/em> cities, where evolution proceeds under the influence of urbanization, where the chemistry of soils sings of our presence, where children experience nature in the physics of buildings and unprecedented night migrations rather than in forests or camping under the stars. It precludes us from the harder task of envisioning what it would take to make cities sustainable, livable, resilient, and just.<\/p>\n

The choice implied in seeing nature and cities as two tones of the same color\u2014where LA\u2019s \u201cFloral loops\/Of the freeway express and exchange\u201d, per Gary Snyder\u2019s \u201cNight Song of the Los Angeles Basin\u201d\u2014reminds me of the conscious choice that David Foster Wallace talks about in his famous 2005 commencement speech, \u201cThis is Water\u201d<\/a>. In the speech (and I\u2019m paraphrasing here), Foster Wallace laments how much easier it is for us to walk through the world as though it revolves solely around us, as individuals, than it is for us to choose<\/em> to project ourselves into the equal complexity of others\u2019 lives. It is a far harder exercise, he says, to imagine that the person driving an obnoxious Hummer on your evening commute does so out of debilitating fear of getting in a car accident, than it is to snippily declare them representatives of everything that is wrong with middle America.<\/p>\n

It may very well be, Foster Wallace acknowledges, that the Hummer driver has no legitimate, humanizing reason for her car choice. But this is beside the point: that the practice of opening ourselves to the experiences of others allows us to conceptualize better ways to be human beings. \u201cThe alternative\u201d, he says, \u201cis unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing\u201d.<\/p>\n

This \u201cdefault setting\u201d, as it relates to our association of nature in cities with degradation and a profound sense of loss, is also on display in Urban Nature<\/em>. Take Mary Oliver\u2019s \u201cSwans on the River Ayr\u201d, in which she writes of the swans: \u201cThese ailing spirits clipped to live in cities \/ Whom we have tamed and made as sad as geese.\u201d Here, city swans are literally deprived by people of their born capacity for flight. Instead, they lead \u201cclipped\u201d, domesticated existences in the dirty shadows of their non-urban counterparts. Oliver links this diminishing to people\u2019s alteration of species and systems. Similar laments appear throughout the anthology in chronicles of species gone extinct (\u201cAnd so, my dear, unheard, a single Santa Barbara sparrow \/ Will sing its last spare song\u201d, writes Stephen Yenser in a poem dedicated to his daughter) and bodies crushed violently in the name of automobile-driven progress (\u201cNo mercy for that twist of fur, the rush of travelers \/ streaming home\u201d, writes Madeline Defrees).<\/p>\n

These poems are not wrong; indeed, many of them are painfully stunning. But by capturing this one kind of truth\u2014this manifestly obvious, bitter, default kind of truth\u2014of nature in cities, they reinforce the motif of the concrete jungle inhospitable to anything but three-toed pigeons (\u201cBeaks evolved for gutter cracks, handouts. \/ Hooked toes fit for a witch\u2019s brew\u201d, as in Daniel Tobin\u2019s \u201cPigeons\u201d).<\/p>\n

Honest as they feel, these kinds of poems do not represent the sole truth of nature in cities. There is also the truth we can choose to understand, if we work a little harder: a biophilic moment in Tilden park, where Alison Hawthorne Deming sees the human culture of the San Francisco Bay Area\u2014\u201cthe tie-dyed, book-happy city\u201d\u2014seeping into natural forms, where \u201cwater sings with the stones\u201d and trees may \u201chave consciousness,\/can feel their wood thicken\u201d. There is wonder at the sight of wildlife, adapting and using cityscapes, like Barton Sutter\u2019s Peregrine Falcon, who \u201cfolded his wings and dropped, \/ A living bomb, in his heart-stopping stoop, \/ One hundred eighty miles an hour headfirst toward the pavement. \/ And then the opening of wings, the swoop, \/ The rising up, and all that open sky\u201d.<\/p>\n

As we well know, the human species is entering into a new relationship with cities<\/a> and nature: one where most people\u2019s experiences with natural phenomena will occur, for better or worse, in urban spaces. We are still grappling with how we want those cities to perform on behalf of communities, wildlife, and ecosystems. In doing the kinds of revelatory linguistic turns that make cities natural, and nature in cities whole, Hawthorne Deming, Sutter, Revard, and many others whose work appears in Urban Nature<\/em>\u00a0access a new function of poetry: as a tool of choice that we should exercise far more frequently as we continue in the challenging task of visioning future cities.<\/p>\n

Laura Booth<\/strong>
\nNew York City<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities<\/a><\/p>\n

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