Idaho Commission for Libraries

Cultures can change landscape and landscape can change cultures. Poetry records these changes.

By Ford Swetnam

Recalling his beginnings as a poet, William Wordsworth wrote that for him the surface of the universal earth came to work like a sea, even the solid mountains becoming changeable as clouds. Seeing the earth as a process enabled him to begin to write poems that, paradoxically, still seem to record a specific place, a specific human culture, and a specific mind in touch with both.

When we speak about the imagery of nature and culture in the centennial anthology of Idaho’s poetry which Ron McFarland and William Studebaker edited for the University of Idaho Press (Moscow: 1989), it’s well to remember how Wordsworth came to see fluidity as the central fact of both. For as McFarland and Studebaker point out, the concepts of "Idaho’s Poetry" or "our region," superficially so solid, become slippery once you have to begin making choices of poems. Poets come and go; we get residents, visitors, and exotics about as they come to your bird feeder. The makeup, distribution, and economy of the population have changed, particularly with the concentration of people in the cities from 1970 forward. Partly because of this last change, things change too---rivers, landforms, even light. Cultures may change landscape, as a successful irrigation project might do; landscape can also change cultures, as a failed irrigation project might do. Poetry records these changes to animals, vegetable, minerals, and spirits, and presents our region as something like a poem, something both still and moving.

Because the editors juxtaposed antique and contemporary poems in the Native Poems section, the sense of change is inescapable there. Audiences focus immediately on Phil George’s naming poem (15), where violent cultural collision is dramatized by the question of whether the speaker will be called "Phil George" or "TWO FLOCKS OF GEESE LIGHTING UPON STILL WATERS." The poem unwraps itself; the apparently simple question by which it moves is "who is talking?" But there’s a difference between the poem and the prose statement one might make of it, and to explain that difference one has to talk about the poem’s arrangement. Why is the last stanza placed last? Because we change down through false identities to the true one. What connects this poem to "region?" The anthropological accidents, at least, but then "TWO FLOCKS OF GEESE…" is a name that implies connection between nature (geese) and culture (person with a name) while "Phil George" is the kind of name that connects person to person within a culture. So the imposition of alien names is a double uprooting, and place comes back into the poem when the right name is restored.

Name Giveaway

That teacher gave me a new name… again.
She never even had feasts or a giveaway!

Still I do not know what "George" means;
and now she calls me "Phillip."

TWO FLOCKS OF GEESE LIGHTNING UPON
STILL WATERS
Must be a name too hard to remember.

---Phil George

Most audiences will assume that the Native poetry, translated or not, works like this, insisting on human connection with a durable and honored landscape, as when Smohalla dismisses agriculture by asking whether he shall tear his mother's breast (10). But the flood stories and etiologies ("the monster may be seen in Kamiah today," 12) show that old things can pass away or new ones be made, and poetry must record these changes if the connections are to be kept up. It’s also true that humans can come to listen mostly to the songs of their own imaginations. That’s when poet/shamans reconnect humans and landscape, perhaps in a hunting song or medicine song, looking for the bird that could look for the sickness (9). That’s to say that without connection between landscape and culture, culture will die. But the connection is not absolute: humans must finally court humans, and that was neither spirit nor bird you heard last night, but I with my flute (17).

The pioneer poems that fit in with the "encountering Idaho" themes for the series lead easily into generalizations about the difference between an American Indian way of seeing land as nearly consubstantial with ourselves and a pioneer way of seeing it as something to be developed or worked, or as a test of the soul. I’ve already argued that the native poems suggest that the consubstantiality is something that must be maintained by ritual, including poetry, and I will want to argue that some pioneer poetry can criticize conventional pioneering imagery. First, though, let’s define conventions.

The pioneer, of course, is a famous marginal figure, away from civilization but civilizing, a child of culture to the degree that the mountain man or minor is a child of nature. This marginal position is something the speakers of the poems embrace or come to love, and they express that love with conventional landscape symbolism. Cleared spaces, half wild and half natural, depict our own condition; smoke from a chimney is a Jacob’s ladder; pitchers or pools of water may suggest a wild baptism, and so on. If, as in "Bear Lake Forever," geography is a refuge, then the landscape features (barely drawn in that poem) become a guarantee and a symbol of liberty, not unlike our film montage of Tetons plus flag. Perhaps the speaker is on a classic American "errand into the wilderness," there to save the world or the soul: such a speaker, though surrounded by wolf and panther, might envision a "new year" in which homesteads and clustered roofs along the Payette and Boise will be the harvest pioneers such as he had sown (32). Indeed.

So it is fair to say that the assumptions of the pioneer poem are most often progressivist, as in George P. Wheeler’s "Idaho Retrospective" (49), where there’s no doubt that nature (including now the Native) has to be tamed by a brawling race of giants if she (and Nature is a she in this kind of poem) is to be bountiful.

But the imagery of nature and culture in the Pioneer poems is not just progressivist posturing; sometimes there’s nostalgia for the landscape the pioneer’s own efforts are causing to pass away. "The Cabin on the Bar" dramatizes the nostalgia, including the sense that pioneers themselves will go the way of the people they supplanted. In Leo Marx’s famous phrase, the machine is in the garden, and the machine accelerates change.

As human trace becomes more prominent on the land, poets find they have to interpret small traces in the landscape to tell stories of the vanished. They again become mediators between nature and culture, or, more often, between the present and a vanished culture that is presented as having been closer to nature. Grace Edgington Jordan’s gothic tale, with its conclusion that "where fire has been you’d better not go," presents just such an aesthetic of long tales built up from small traces (104). There’s only part of an amethyst bottle left in Charles Potts’ view up the hill from Mackay, but that’s enough for the story (109).

But if poets of this phase watch for and interpret human traces, they also listen for natural music. Charles David Wright’s "There Comes A Wind" works its way through images that combine the natural and the human (plums like wise women, leaves like postcards) only to deny that that was the wind; the wind is something wholly itself, and can’t be compared to human things or cultivated things at all (131). Diane Raptosh and Vern Rutsala variously present images of Idaho that evanesce, slip away from us like silverfish---roads that lead nowhere, a memory that’s false---in order to present an Idaho that exists in the mind in contrast with an Idaho that exists only for itself (110,112).

Contemporary poets who inherit these intersections between nature and culture as a subject usually assume that they are describing shifting realities. Geological or climatic changes affect nature; cultures change; human personalities, even those of the speaker, grow, oxidize, or explode. Many versions of pastoral are possible here. One can accept the human presence, even enjoy it, as in Daryl E. Jones’ "Un Bel Di," where the machine in the garden, a radio in this case, plays a nice counterpoint to the light. One can wish that nature could somehow shake free of the human, as the speaker of Penelope Reedy’s "I Continue" wishes she could see the landscape as it is, not as whatever human it reminds her of. Ecologically minded poets often want to separate the natural and the human to give them equal standing; in Janne Goldbeck’s "Lava II" the stone is "Pentecostal," so it may reach across the boundary to the human, but it is first of all stone (161). Harald Wyndham’s restless human fisherman dissolves into the river (222); Alex Kuo’s people live beside a river of whose power and standing they are unknowing without a poet to tell them (181). And there are still the vanished for whom to speak: Bill Studebaker’s old man staggering "from Main to Main" or caves where you can hear Glenn Miller (205,207), Ron McFarland’s cop in a town that doesn’t need a good one (192), Scott Preston’s derelict saint placed in and isolated in the Sun Valley landscape ((203). We’re all, as Greg Keeler says, "flicking our wrists toward flux" (106).

Ford Swetnam is a professor of English at Idaho State University and co-editor of High Sky Over All: Idaho Fiction at the Centennial (Pocatello: Idaho State University Press, 1990), an anthology of short fiction by 25 Idaho writers.

Work Cited

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Return to the Tough Paradise Theme Page

Return to Top