Forrest Gander’s Desert Phenomenology | The Nation

Forrest Gander maintains a good relationship with the mineral world and has made a habit in his poetry of displaying a deep familiarity with the layers of sediment beneath our feet. His expertise — Gander is a geologist by training — allowed him to convert technical terms (such as fault zone, ilmeniteAnd olivine) into lyrical tools that capture rarefied emotional states and complex relational systems. It is therefore quite natural that his latest collection, Ghost of Mojaveopens with an act of geophagy. “The first dirt I tasted was a handful of siltstone dust outside the house where I was born in the Mojave Desert,” Gander writes in a brief preface. The earth, the rocks, the minerals that make up the land around him are a hint of intimacy, of a time and place that shaped his fluid sensibility. The merging of the human and non-human realms becomes an act of self-recognition for Gander, allowing him a deeper understanding of himself and the place of his birth.

But Ghost of Mojave is also an elegy, and the grief Gander expresses here is another form of intimacy we might develop with the land. His mother, who died in 2020, is the titular ghost:

Back here, he imagines it
everywhere he looks. As the spring hills turn green.

All the crows are awake.

Flared by the paper cut of her perfume in her memory.

For her, it was home. This city
where various Christian movements
fundamentalism intersects
with uncontrolled expansion of retail trade.

The landscape of the house is therefore not necessarily charmed. Often, like Ghost of Mojave studies mourning, the way in which it is inscribed in the soul but also in the environment, it takes the form of a grief map. “From the rain-blurred window of the accessories store / where you loved to go, a kneeling Elamite bull god, / carved in alabaster, holds out a ritual vessel / to the oncoming torrent, a world always in motion. // He must have seen you pass by too.” The observation is charming in its obliqueness, the embeddedness and the particularity of its central assumption, which is in reality little more than a whim: You too must have passed through this place, you must have seen and been seen. Throughout Ghost of MojaveGander achieves a delicate balancing act, bridging the gap between the vastness of the natural world and the smaller, personal space of memory verse.

Over the course of nearly four decades and 13 collections, Gander has developed a poetics defined above all by its thematic and formal hybridity: it is a poetry of transfusion, obsessed with crossing the boundaries between mediums, between the animate and the inanimate. A proponent and sometimes practitioner of ecopoetry, Gander is committed to describing the natural world while countering an anthropocentric reading of it. As he writes in Redstart: an ecological poetics (2012), a truly ecological poetry would be that which “displays[s] Or [is] invested with values ​​that recognize the economy of relationships between human and non-human domains.

Thematically, it’s easy to imagine how this might be achieved – decentering the speaker, toning down any paeans to the splendors of the natural world – but formally it raises more interesting questions. How to evoke the being of an insect? How can we delineate the weave of life on a forest floor? How can we sing about the otherness of moss growing on a stone? Gander has conducted a series of experiments in verse in recent collections, including this 2021 one. Twice alivein which he spreads his lines across the page, forcing them into new relationships that aim for a non-linear reading – to capture something of the synchronicity and interconnectedness of experiences that we tend to associate with fungi and other rhizomatic life forms.

In terms of form, Ghost of Mojave is less radical in comparison, but it nevertheless seems well suited to its particular task: organizing a diffuse vigil, grieving in weightlessness. A long, continuous poem in blank verse with no defined stanza structure, Ghost of Mojave moves at a meditative pace. Its quivering rhythms imitate those of a slow desert wind, collecting dust, glitter and bones of small mammals, a kind of primordial accumulation:

In the molecular sand at the foot of the cliff,
pale fossils appear after rain, mainly
ammonites and bryozoans. Talking to me.

That’s when the raft of dabbling ducks explodes.

Sections of walking the San Andreas Fault after a series of personal tragedies allowed Gander to think critically about the “fractures and folds that underlie not only my country,” as he writes in the book’s preface, “but all of me in its relationship to others.” The desert, of course, can be read like a poem, but constantly rewritten. “And although / the rocks hum / with energy, pulsing in harmony // with the vibrations of the earth, their hum // is beyond what we hear. So / the ground truth is a constant / revision,” Gander writes. “Who can read / through the dizzying stanza / the pauses?

What we might call the linguistic meaning of the natural world will always be beyond us. When we seek to understand it, Gander suggests, we miss the resources of the natural world. symbolic meaning – how its relationship with the human self is one in constant revision.

Gander’s wife, the poet CD Wright, died suddenly in 2016, and his 2018 collection To be with is largely an oblique cycle of elegies for her. According to Gander, grief is an integrated thing. “Your impact marks / invade the resin / of my mind”, one of the last poems of To be with affirms. Gander is interested in exploring grief as a mode of relating to the world, one that can intensify the experience rather than numb it. Grief, handled well, is a form of observance and, therefore, is contiguous with love and respect for those we have lost.

Grief is only half the story Ghost of Mojaveand recent works by Gander. The book is also a celebration, more precisely a epithalamium. Gander is now married to artist Ashwini Bhat, and much of Ghost of Mojave is addressed to him. To the extent that the book dwells on this new romance, it is also a story of regeneration, an awakening of the senses:

Like the magnet under a glass table filled with iron shavings, you guide me.

Your warm, conductive flesh. Your perfume
collecting in the hollows above your collarbones

It was your imperative that launched me forward. After I stopped.
After the currents of possibility
that ran through my arteries were choked
with piles of memories, doubts and reassessments.

Arm in arm, going down the well.

I, the ghost, the forgotten apostle of adoration.

We are not accustomed to thinking of dryness and sensuality as companion phenomena, but in Gander’s poetry they are seamlessly married; it seems almost alchemical, for example, the way he imbues these iron shavings – brittle, sharp – with a tender mobility, a certain disjointed side. The desert is expressly empty; on a walking tour with Bhat, Gander writes: “We pass through miles of desert grass / dotted with palm trees. Shimmering warmth.” And yet, there is something in the barren vacancy of the land that allows for transcendence. In the Mojave, “whatever it is / comes out of its sluice,” the fluid moves outward along a natural gradient. “What is more sacred than the gratuity/the opulence of this void? It is an arrogant sublimity – an oceanic feeling without an ocean, a revelation without weight.

The very goal of this method is to break the bonds of human subjectivity and merge with the different modes of being that abound in the natural world. The emphasis is rather placed on the recognition of the vital force beyond the forms: “Is not the /materiality of this Joshua tree, its /living presence, more than what it signifies? » asks the book. Poetry wants to tear away the veil that habit has drawn over the natural world. And yet, it pushes us to step back and stay, to resist the urge to apply a new layer of meaning to what we have experienced.

Gander is probably American poetry’s foremost living exponent of what Helen Vendler, in an essay on the poet AR Ammons, called “the metaphysics of multiple connections.” In the past he has written about his admiration for the “phenomenological poetics” of George Oppen. “Instead of the traditional Western narrative of a consciousness digesting the external world,” Gander observes in his collection of essays. A faithful existence (2005), “Oppen honors a consciousness intertwined with the world of objects, a consciousness that is nothing if not a collaboration with the world. » If there is a central lesson in Gander’s poetry, it might be precisely this: consciousness, identity and being itself are collaborations.

Over the past decade, he has repeatedly returned to the image of lichen, an emblem of fusion and an allegory, as it were, of the combinatorial nature of identity as revealed in the act and experience of intimacy. “With lichen”, as he emphasizes in the preliminary note of Twice alive“The original organisms are completely changed in their compactness. They cannot return to what they were.” In Node (2022), the speaker of a poem echoes this observation. “Like the component species of a lichen, I gave up something to become something else,” it reads. “And I am impenetrable, inviolable, without the dimension necessary for anything to break me.”

Lichen is present twice Ghost of Mojavefirst as a simple description – an orange stain on the “broken tile roof” of a church – and later in an evocation of Bhat’s voice, which sounds in Gander “as low and sure / and fragile as lichens”. These are subtle references, and in general Ghost of Mojave is a whispering book, as sober as its two namesakes. The images rarely return, except for a little refrain: “What bird wove these sprigs of lavender, mint, yarrow, and lemongrass into a nest under the rusty light of our porch?” This is an auspicious time for fusion and entanglement. Although composite, these plants constituted a new whole: a nest and a house. We find the human kingdom, often with a playful warmth. Nature is “an endless memory of disruption,” as Gander writes in Twice alive. Marriage, which he calls “a divination of resonant relationships” Ghost of Mojavemight as well be added to this list.