Opinion: Sand, soil and much verse

Human greed has distanced itself from earth by burrowing into it, making it unsustainable, even toxic

By Pramod K Nayar

Poetry sometimes finds its roots, literally, in the soil. In sharp contrast to the air-bound poetry about larks, nightingales, eagles and hawks, from the Wordsworth group through Tennyson and Ted Hughes, there is poetry that concerns, and confines, itself to the land.

From Heights to Bogs

Topographical poetry in the English literary tradition includesworks like John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (1668). Such poetry offered detailed accounts of locales and localities, and very often took a moral position. More often than not, the poem presented a man of ‘means’, that is, an upper class landowner or traveller, viewing the land in what came to be called ‘the prospect view’. The land was a spectacle but was also full of potential (‘prospect’ was also ‘prospects’). Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest and William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ are famous examples of such poetry.

It offered sweeping vistas and, although geology was of some interest in the early decades of the 19^th century when the science was just emerging as the critic Noah Heringman has shown in his Romantic Rocks, the preference for the scenic over the seismic — to invoke a distinction by the critic John Charles Ryan — was very clear.

Seamus Heaney, differing widely from such topographic poets, opted to pay attention to the earth’s physiognomy (its sur-face, which is also a face) and dermatological make-up. Renowned for his ‘bog poetics’, Heaney turned to the bog, the peat and the mud. Take for instance ‘Bogland’:

Our unfenced country
Is bog …

Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter

Melting and opening underfoot…

soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,

Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.

Note Heaney’s attention to texture. This is stratigraphic poetry at its best, as Heaney also points to the human interventions and disruptions into the earth: cutting, drilling, digging. Heaney presents the land as possessing not just texture but also character. In ‘Come to the Bower’, Heaney describes the land:

Out of the black maw 
Of the peat, sharpened willow 

Withdraws gently.

In other poems like ‘Punishment’, ‘The Tollund Man in Springtime’, ‘Bog Queen’ and others, Heaney merges myth and legend with the land. The focus on materiality and structure of the land, as few poets have undertaken, marks Heaney. The bog is not a dirty, smelly place. In Heaney, it is muse, history, myth and an ecosystem in itself.

Stratigraphic Poetry

Many poets from the Global South have begun to pay attention to the land rather than the landscape. The emphasis is not so much on grand prospect views but on the ground humans walk on, grow crops in, colonise for oil and to which, with death, all life forms return. Stratigraphic poetry is about the texture and tactility of the soil, mud, sand, stone, the minerals and lava, the basalt and limestone (the last, made famous by WH Auden in his ‘In Praise of Limestone’).

In John Kinsella’s ‘Arrival: First Lines Typed at Jam Tree Gully’, the speaker describes the feldspar and mica which give the land a ‘sheen’. The humans and nonhumans here share a ‘sandstone past’. We see the speaker’s eye move across the ‘flakes of granite/and lichen’ through ‘laterite smudgings’ and the ‘anomaly of pyrites’, before turning to the flora and fauna. Literally grounding the sense of place in the soil of the region, Kinsella’s rooted poetics highlights the surface and subsurface on which life, both human and nonhuman, depends.

Native American poets like Simon Ortiz see the land as the site of all origin in ‘The Creation According to Coyote’:

You were born when you came

from that body, the earth;
your black head burst from granite,

the ashes cooling

Getting back to this earth which creates, sustains and finally envelops the mortal remains of all life forms is a theme in many poets who recognise – and romanticise – the necessity of retaining some measure of connection with the land. Inupiaq-Inuit poet dg nanoukOkpik in ‘Salt Cedar on Kokonee at Susitna River’, describes a person trying to reach the earth:

When the mud dried, black spruce culled
at the river’s lapse, I slouched over to fill my mouth—

the ice-packed gorge flowed over my fingers.
I cupped then drank. Right hand first, left followed.

Is this the way to the earth?

Cathy Tagnak Rexford, the Inupiaq poet,suggeststhat for Native Americans the land provides not just sustenance and habitation but also the very language of human intimacy:

as if

the damp earth left its fingerprint on your

eyelids as we sat across from each other

in the café.

Colonisation and postcolonial greed have damaged this land, right to its very depths. Chilean Mapuche poet LeonelLienlaf in ‘They Come Down Yelling Through the Fields’ writes about the natives massacred in the opening stanza: they ‘already lying/on the floor’. The white men walk over the murdered natives. Lienlaf merges the injuries on the human persons with the injuries on the land:

Over them the white men walk

          Fatally wounding the land

The Nigerian poetTanureOjaide too is concerned about the greed for the wealth below the land that drives change. In his ‘On the Mountain’, the natives cry for sustenance from the ‘cosmic abundance’ of the land. But this abundance is no longer for the natives: it now belongs to ‘the brigands that have taken over’. The speaker suggests that, now that the land has been mined and exploited, colonised and ruined, it ‘needs to be scrubbed/with bare hands’. The visual spectacle of ruin segues into a tactile connection with the denuded land. Ojaideinverts the traditional prospect view in the last lines of the poem:

On this mountain of fortune, look
at the day ahead, spread out

with unbounded wealth and sacrifice.

It is no prospect, but the prospect of death and denudation.

Guam poet Craig Santos Perez in ‘Halloween in the Anthropocene’ speaks of how the mining of the earth has poisoned the humans on the surface. Here, the eyes of native youth are ‘open-pit uranium mines’, their veins ‘poisoned rivers’ and hearts, ‘tar sands tailings ponds’. Thus, the human is the embodiment of the place’s evil materiality so that geophagy — the destruction of the earth— becomes biophagy, the destruction of life.

Stratigraphic poetry demonstrates how life is sustained by the earth’s many layers. But it also notes how human greed has distanced itself from earth by burrowing into it, making it unsustainable, even toxic. Human indifference to the history of a place, which is a part of planetary historyitself, is best summarised by the indigenous Australian poet Samuel Wagan Watson:

how do you know?

that the mud doesn’t feel the pain

of your weight upon its resting place

how do you know?

how do we know

that this could be our final resting place?

or sacred to someone else

but how can you tell?

(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)