“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”
The Romantic poets, who were the forerunners of what is now called eco-poetry, marveled at the splendor of the natural world—albeit one arguably less tainted by climate change, the massive elimination of species, wildfires, hurricanes, floods, tornados, and dense urbanization everywhere. Or were they simply naïve and idealistic, able to ignore the haze of emphysema-inducing coal dust that hung permanently over London in their time, companion to the sewage running down its streets? They evoke a sense of purity in poem after poem, such as Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.”
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
In the 21st century, “nature poetry” continues to be written, though often with a more critical eye. As the 2008 anthology Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology puts it, “poetry is the most distilled verbal expression of environmental awareness.” Rapture as such at the forest, mountains, rivers, and seas comprising Earth never goes out of style, yet it is more difficult today to discern whether that half-hidden violet is seen through a haze made of morning fog, or just polluted air. In “Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner,” the moderator, Angela Hume, reflects on this very process of development from Wordsworth et alii to now:
“While eco-poetics may lead to a kind of ‘nature poetry’ reframed or re-conceived, it is still very much rooted in the soil of the earlier practices and of Romanticism…Eco-poetics may not necessarily be inspired directly by scientific evidence of human environmental impact. We can see, for example, what we might call an eco-poetic sensibility quite active in the work of the modernists- long before science could tell us definitively that we humans are responsible for a changing climate and a global water crisis. And yet: that moment came at which poets could no longer write ‘nature’ as something not entirely implicated in and by human society.”
What Hume describes is characteristic of the modus operandi of fierce lyric poets, with their tendency to jump eras when looking for sources of inspiration, to honor the good found in “historic” lyric, while also making use of techniques, attitudes and approaches that offer maximum freedom to adopt and adapt, whether it be Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “external and internal impressions…driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre,” or Charles Bernstein’s caveat “Do not fixate on poem, voice, other striated and arbitrary meaning formations. We offer a processual, unbounded methodology that can be applied to any language and can include all languages.” If the tenor of these poetics seems conflicting, fierce lyricism, in practice, seems to find a way to overcome that fact, by fusion, dialectic, the creation of a hybrid, or whatever one wants to call it. Given that fierce lyric is not any sort of conscious movement but, rather, diverse tendencies within a large scope, these poetry practitioners, like all writers, are simply looking for immediate solutions for what they want to say—better put, how they want to say. They are carrying forth a legacy, yet bound by a new understanding.
In his 2004 essay “On Difficulty in Contemporary American Poetry,” the post-structuralist philosopher-critic Charles Altieri, one of the energetic promoters of “language” poetry (viz Bernstein), begins by lamenting that “experimental poetry has fallen on hard times. Poetry that makes its difficulty a basic means to accomplishing its ends seems now mostly a throwback, a fantasy that the excitements of modernist art can continue into the present.” He realizes that the “language” orientation, which largely commanded haute critical attention of the 1980s and 1990s, had reached an impasse by the turn of the century. Yet, rather than simply despair, Altieri looks at more recent poems that allow a reconciliation between alienation and harmony with the social. At the same time, he also seems particularly concerned that contemporary poetry does not rely on a naive “species of inwardness as a now anachronistic model of subjectivity.”
Within this debate about lyric poetry, Melissa Kwasny’s 2024 collection The Cloud Path holds an advantageous position. The book’s “I” is prone to rapture and inwardness as she contemplates her Montana landscape of rivers, streams, mountains, and woods, profuse with plant and animal life, all of it personally meaningful to her. Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined, all with the keenly observant eye of an experienced naturalist. What keeps her from being “unitary” is that she is at odds with herself, busy constructing a polyphonic voicing with room for both wonder and skepticism as she talks to herself, and to us. Neither farmer nor professional scientist, she dwells poetically in a world that is an artifice, but not a conceit for her self-assurance. She constantly gauges herself within this sphere, likewise within her art, as in “The Fern Path.”
Green blossoms of the water host, the splayed
riparian fronds—four feet wide and still
dripping from the all-day rain. But why describe
what is still new to me, as poet Stéphane
Mallarmé asked, instead of searching for the flower
absent from all earthly bouquets. Oyster light,
islanders call it when sun barely leaks through clouds.
Who taught me what is hidden is more valuable?
Quiet is different than silence, the latter more potent,
more mature. Quiet is self-conscious, shallow,
in making others bend to hear you, an aesthetic choice
as in the quiet of these mixed diurnal tides,
which happen twice a day but not in regular patterns.
What silence means: an unaccountable caesura,
as in now new deaths were recorded in the last week.
It is silence that subtracts from the great harbor
the boats. It is not silence without my lost ones in it.
In this remarkable poem of restless, troubled seas, though we get the kind of topoi that would delight Shelley, they seem less an occasion for Kwasny’s mere interiority than an occasion for connection with the social world. While the speaker begins in solitude, reflecting on a fellow artist, she uses that reference to question her solitary quest for the perfect flower, asking herself “Why describe what is still new to me?” As such, she stops searching for the Platonic plant that might send her into spasms of lyrical ecstasy that would overmatch the reality of the unpredictable, sometimes hostile natural world around her. The ecosphere is not that obliging.
Instead, Kwasny dives into her philosophical mind, differentiating between the shallowness of “quiet” (à la Wordsworth “wandering lonely as a cloud”) and silence. In quiet, her “I” would be “making others bend to hear you,” a self-centered way of thinking, which she disqualifies, when taken alone, as a merely “aesthetic choice.” The mixed diurnal tides rhythmically and mentally insinuate her out of a stagnant, self-conscious reverie. To that, she contrasts silence, “an unaccountable caesura,” which must include consciousness of actual people in her world who have died when their boats wrecked. She ends that portion of the poem by claiming kinship with them: “It is not silence without my lost ones in it.” In this way, though solitary, she is not self-enclosed. Even alone, she remains social by means of deliberate reaching mentally beyond the immediate environment.
If her poetry does indeed reach back to Wordsworth, seeking the transhistorical relevance of lyric from that age, “lonely as a cloud” is not the apt comparison. More fittingly, it would be “Surprised by Joy,” a potent poem in which Wordsworth abandons brief rapture for the sudden , searing, and sobering memory of his child’s death.
That thought’s return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
In assessing the role of the transcendental ego (e.g., the self that must underlie all human thought and perception), Altieri, in an essay drawing parallels between the phenomenologist Edward Husserl and the poet Wallace Stevens, remarks:
Imagination is distinctive, in fact, precisely because it requires a more concrete, more immediate, and more capacious context for its operations than can be provided by any form of social analysis. Indeed, that is why the concept depends on a transcendental ego. Imagination focuses not upon the self who experiences but the self whose affective being must be projected to explain the possibility of the experiences that we ‘realize.’ (Italics mine.)
Thus, even Altieri, who at other times has called into question lyric’s historical over-reliance on the “unitary I,” acknowledges that poetic consciousness originates in a self. That self is sheerly perceptual rather than a being bent on congratulating itself on its keen capacity for sensitivity. Contemporary usage of the “I” in poetry, such as Kwasny performs, creates the self as perceiver-in-chief, not to glorify her sensitive ego but, rather, to serve as a discerning mediator between us and the ecological world (formerly known as just “nature”). In this, Kwasny, the maker of paths, shows a viable path for eco-poetry.
The structure of The Cloud Path is demonstrated in a plenitude of poems offering different literal and possibly symbolic paths: “The River Path,” “The Aspen Path,” “The Chokecherry Path,” “The Bitterroot Path,” “The Glitter Path,” “The Path of Melting Ice,” “The Fern Path,” “The Sleep Path,” and “The Willow Path.” Sometimes, these poems follow one another; more often, they appear at irregular intervals. This off-kilter sequence indicates how Kwasny works here as poet: irregularity within a basic structure. The poems are appropriately more organic than formalist.
In “The Bitterroot Path,” one watches her move from lyric’s uncontaminated source of wonder in its Romantic roots to self-doubt and worry about the ecosphere and the relative ability of the solitary ‘I’ to properly address and name the disaster, much less rectify it.
If we live in mythic times
the American bitterroot could be a signet,
a crest
of bleached out rose,
pinpointing. An ancient source, ignored.
Read the headlines.
Scientists are worried about our health
in an increasingly noisy world
I used to be so certain my solitude
would be disturbed I cried in anticipation of it.
When were we most quiet? Listening
to the speech of herbs.
I mean, an inner quiet—
coming from not being able to control anything.
Isn’t that what flowering does?
Let the poet’s voice still as the herbs speak—not through her, as the lyre does in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. But rather speak to her.
This poet’s intuitive command of seemingly relaxed form, despite her use of quintains, is signal. She is following the motion of her mind. At the outset, we are reminded that the mythic quality, both of the natural world and lyric poetry (she often makes the two equivalent), is highly conditional. The initial “if” suggests a logical proposition to be proven or disproven. Things look bad because the ancient source has been ignored. Instead, the world is noisy, and our health outlook is precarious. The stop and go of her lines mimics the sensation of being jerked around by her “bitter” frustration, so bitter that it is “rooted” in the titular plant. The lineation simulates her restless state of mind and her initial stuck-ness.
In an interview in American Literary Review, Kwasny explains her method of lineation as it has developed through practice:
Gradually, my lines became longer, less strict—I needed more fluidity, to be able to move between the natural images I encountered, and statements generated by, not interpreted from, them (emphasis mine). The longer line helped, but I still felt the images weren’t able to breathe fully. They seemed too dense, cornered, unconnected. I wanted my consciousness to be able to grow with them; I wanted the images to cluster within the matrix of my understanding, to dialogue with the world, not just my world but through me the world they inhabit. I wanted to be able to move from image to statement organically, not necessarily rationally, and then to proceed to the next image or statement without the artificial stop of a line break…I needed a more associative form.
Could one ask for a more responsibly self-aware and nuanced poet than this? The method this experienced poet has developed for herself allows her to offer a subtle eco-poetics, true to its lyric source yet adapted to the exigencies of the current catastrophes that lurk behind her verse.
We feel the push and pull of what Altieri refers to above as a “self whose affective being must be projected to explain the possibility of [her] experiences.” That transcendental ego creates the “capacious context for its operations” rather than soaring effortlessly into an unrealistic moment of total sublimity, heightened by conspicuous enjambment and other apparent artifice. Rather, she trusts the signifying power of the language of lyric, as she asks herself questions, while “listening to the speech of herbs.” She trusts “inner quiet—coming from not being able to control anything.” After which, and only then, comes imagistic uplift—perhaps—but as so often in her verse, in the form of a question: “Isn’t that what flowering does?” The intent is social. The outcome, uncertain. The question is for us as well as for her. The poem ends with an imagistic paradox.
We are drawn to the bright upper cadences—
While the bitter roots hide underneath.
Only a writer deeply acquainted with the history of lyric, both familiar and uncomfortable with it, restless about its contemporary relevance, could play with such blithe skill upon our expectations about what such a poem might deliver. Rather than “honesty” (quotation marks deliberate), she offers strategy. Contemplative solitude blows right past the conventional “overheard” speaker, having it both ways by making us a party to her privacy and—softly, softly—getting in our faces.
One sees this gesture of questioning, this line-by-line enactment of dynamic thought, of a consciousness moving stealthily, slowly, surely, from the solitary to the social, along the spectrum from despair to hope, throughout this collection.
“The Doctrine of Signatures”:
Given my character, I will always be
the fir out my window—slow to act, to make decisions.
given my disposition, I will live my life in one place,
not trembling like the aspen, but swaying
like the heavy spruce, troubled by forces large than me—
the wind, the rains, the sun.
“The Lupine Path”:
Ashen of roses is a color, not a sentiment.
The lupines hold out their deeply divided hands.
“Cliff Lake”:
A flock of blackbirds disappears into the surface of the sky.
We’re still here, on the other side of fading.
“The Path of Melting Ice”:
We come from nothing we can remember,
and travel toward a place we know nothing about,
the margins of our lives closed to us.
like a block of ice in a sea of ice breaking apart.
All of these are paths of uncertainty. Time and again, Kwasny leaves us on “the next eschatological landing.” Her speaker frequently uses end-stopped lines to make categorical declarations yet ones that point toward doubt rather than waxing self-assured. Her declarations are ambiguous, couched in image and metaphor, as if they were merely provisional formulations about what happens at the end of time, and how many minutes remain on the doomsday clock due to our collective depredation of the world, our deafness to its ecological needs. The tone is one of speculation and worry. But skillfully, for above all she is a tactician, Kwasny does not directly accuse us. Nor is she encased in the “I.” It is not a standoff, and we are not being denounced. As often as not, the pronoun employed is an unnamed “we,” and she invites us to draw our own inferences, to be a part of the conversation about disaster. This approach is a great way to overcome the inherent limitations of the “overheard I,” given the themes she deals with. Kwasny strikes a beautiful balance between what is both fertile and self-limiting about solitary reflection, employing as a counter-move thought passing between us and her. She is all too happy to point the finger at herself: “given my nature,” “given my disposition.” She takes the first fall and then turns around and reminds us: “we’re still here” and “our lives closed to us.” And she magnificently caps the latter with comparing us to “a block of ice in a sea of ice breaking apart.” That is as close as she comes to a direct call to action.
No matter how far down the trail Kwasny goes, she never forgets about us. Near the end of her many paths, “The Sleep Path” takes time to grieve the death of her mother. If there were a time when a speaker was invited to sink into her own grief, maternal loss would be that time. And, indeed, the poem begins with her characteristic self-questioning. She is the Descartes of lyric doubt, except it is an almost self-annihilating self-doubt.
Will I be as a bare tree, no inspiration to anyone?
A perching place? A snag in the air?
From that stark place she launches into memories of “my mother’s last days, /as I ran, panicked, through the burning fields/as the castle crumbled behind me.” We are treated to another fantastical scenario of destruction. Somewhat recovered, she says:
I came back
from the grief-forest, wishing to be powdered
with rain, to streak my hair with green in solidarity.
Like Keats or Shelley, she briefly wants to be one with “nature.” However, this wish is not to be. Nor may she have the luxury of only recounting her own grief, no matter that she sojourned alone in the grief-forest. Rather, as in classical elegy, grief is public, to be shared. No one owns it: not the dead one, not the filial survivor. At the same time, the poet-speaker reflects on the loss of those fixed public forums for grieving that have gone by the wayside, leaving her to work it out on her own, in the precinct of imagination.
In the past, mourners
wore black for a hundred days, shuttered windows,
draped mirrors. No one could sweep or shave.
Today, there is no grave to speak of. No earrings,
nor the yellow dress that we picked out.
Nor can she become one with the universe, nor even the lone bare tree to which she compared herself to at poem’s beginning. Instead:
But here I am, ashes. As is. Let everyone
Have their sadness. Let my mother have hers, too.
The public is a fragmented one, each mourning apart from the other. In a remarkable reversal, the daughter must imaginatively occupy the place of the deceased and annealed mother, as ashes—a metaphorical extension of imaginative sympathy. The poet must act as her own public, working by proxy. She may only become her mother as her cremated remains. The image is one both of elegiac dignity and personal abjection.
Kwasny ends the poem with an ambiguous, self-contradicting gesture of reclaiming herself.
The name I go by is what my mother chose for me.
But what to use to secretly call myself? Even if
she’s no longer there. Even as I am walking toward her.
Kwasny is nobody’s post-structuralist sage or blank postmodernist. Yet, many times, she does a cagey imitation of both. Nor is she a Romantic throwback. With skill she appropriates the latter’s gestures, as necessary and for her own purposes. This poet is steeped in poetic tradition of all kinds, some of which (René Char’s prose poetry) is simply not within the scope of this essay. The Cloud Path offers a spectrum of ambition that—at many turns—is the definition of fierce lyric, caught between confrontation, evasion and simple deviation; between reverence and impiety. Sometimes ashes, sometimes a tree, sometimes the whole forest, sometimes us, this metamorphic poet is a master of perception—the bitterroot of all emotion—as she walks like Eurydice, optimistically, yet warily, toward Orpheus. Better said, she walks steadfastly toward the fragile, ecologically threatened world, as we gaze on and wonder whether her outcome—our outcome—is fated or free.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
