Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950, Volume 2 by von Hallberg Robert;Faggen Robert;

Author:von Hallberg, Robert;Faggen, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The map with its “pale-green broken wheel” of Brazil furnishes Bishop with her own description of the unspecified macaws: “perching there in profile, beaks agape, / the big symbolic birds keep quiet …”

Four hundred and fifty years later, the North American poet would discover Brazil for herself. But her poem opens not from an outraged feminist perspective but from the ironically compromised position of the colonizing tourist: “Januaries, Nature greets our eyes / exactly as she must have greeted theirs.” Nature, the unabashed welcoming female, is gendered in the poem as a breeding lizard:

The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes

are on the smaller, female one, back-to,

her wicked tail straight up and over,

red as a red-hot wire.

Straight or queer, we readers find ourselves on no one side. Bishop’s shifting alliances teach the primary lesson of ecojustice poetry: moral complicity. After a stanza break, we seem to extend the simile—“Just so the Christians [like the lizards?], hard as nails”—till with the words “came and found it all [like us], / not unfamiliar” we are returned to the poet’s modern perspective. In her essay, Bishop includes among Brazil’s resources the “Indians … friendly and docile, too docile for their own good,”14 and quotes from Caminha’s description of the native Tupi women, a self-interested argument for a Eurocentric natural design: “Our Lord gave them fine bodies and good faces, as to good men, and He who brought us here I believe did not do so without purpose.”15 Bishop’s poem ends with the Catholic soldiers seeking to act on their divinely sanctioned beliefs:

Directly after Mass, humming perhaps

L’Homme armé or some such tune,

they ripped away into the hanging fabric,

each out to catch an Indian for himself—

those maddening little women who kept calling,

calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)

and retreating, always retreating, behind it.

What later became the ecofeminist likening of colonial conquest with sexual violence is distinctly audible in the crypt word beneath “ripped,” raped.16 Also enlightening and instructive is Bishop’s association of the “maddening” (a colonizing irony) women with the birds, which are here not merely or entirely symbolic but actually part of the jungle’s “hanging fabric,” so that the ravishment of the Tupi is both imagined as, and seen as part of, the exploitation of the rainforest.

Closely allied with ecojustice poetry is the recently emergent urban environmental poetry. Modern instances are scarce. If twentieth-century urban poets, “the dwellers in cities,” seemed to forget about nature, suburban and nonurban environmental poets have in turn seemed to forget about cities. The place-based Four Quartets more or less omits St. Louis, Boston, and London (an unseen backdrop in “Little Gidding”), and Rio de Janeiro barely reverberates in “Januaries,” the first word of Bishop’s “Brazil.” A number of especially male poets—Jeffers, Berry, Merwin, Snyder—followed Thoreau’s lead into homemade rural homes and grounds. Indeed, from the vantage point of the country, the city may appear a lure and trap, no more sinisterly so than in Robinson Jeffers’s much anthologized 1937 poem, “The Purse-Seine.” Thinking of the way phosphorescent

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