2 Dwelling With: On the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker
2 Dwelling With: On the Poetry of Lorine Niedecker
In this chapter, I will focus particularly on how two particular concepts: the Land Ethic explicated in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and ecophenomenological insights derived from the insights of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, might be used to change our mental structuring of place and alter our feelings about where (and with what) we dwell. The resulting theorization of dwelling with place, I will argue, can be seen as already partially imminent in the writing of certain poets and prose writers. At that point, I will consider the poetry of Wisconsin native Lorine Niedecker.
In order to imagine ourselves as capable of dwelling with place, we must first see land (place, earth, or environment) as an entity towards which we are capable of having responsibilities. We need not suppose it as possessing sentience, consciousness, desires, will, or even life (though we are free to do any of those things), but we must at least acknowledge its reality, its primacy, and our necessary involvement with it as embodied beings. Many models for doing this exist, but I will focus here primarily on the work of Aldo Leopold, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and pioneer in the field of conservation biology. Among his most notable contributions to the field of ecological thought is his formulation of what he termed “the land ethic.” To understand what Leopold meant by this term, we should first consider how he defined each of the terms singly. Leopold believed conservation to be the struggle to attain “a state of harmony between man and land”; however, his understanding of land was much more extensive than the standard definition (189).[1] He considered land to be “all of the things on, over, or in the earth,” and wrote or land as an organism made up of several competing and cooperative parts. These several parts, he felt, could be regulated, but none could be eliminated or removed without the possibility of serious complications. The interconnectivity of the components that made up biotic systems, which he called the “complexity of the land organism,” was, he felt, “the outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century” (Leopold 189-190). In his lexicon, land conservation was the term used to refer to the human effort to understand and preserve the land’s own capacity for self-renewal (258).
For Leopold, the central human problem in relation to land was that we did not sufficiently integrate land-centered considerations into our decision making.[2] In one particularly poetic passage, Leopold describes a Midwestern bus trip as demonstrating an all-too-common common indifference towards place. For those taking this trip:
The highway stretches like a taut tape across the corn, oats, and clover fields; the bus ticks off the opulent miles; the passengers talk and talk and talk. About what? About baseball, taxes, sons-in-law, movies, motors, and funerals, but never about the heavi