Show Me Your Environment

But what is our environment? Where do we live? Where do we live in our poems?

"We live," Wallace Stevens answers famously in Necessary Angel, "in the mind." And I know what he means. Each perception, each feeling and phenomenon, each human intake is what it is because of our language for it, or in approximation of it, or in signification of its remnants. The imagination is Stevens's great trope, the republic of his art; that is the secret to his aesthetic as well, his supreme fiction. It may also be the source of his limitation. Yet Stevens's preference is fundamental to one strong tendency in our current poetry, a tendency toward an inward poetics whose features include a taste for "intellectual indeterminacy," as one young critic, Kara Candito, has lately written. This indeterminacy includes a radical questioning, or outright rejection, of some customarily held notions of the stability of place, self, and gesture.

Place and self are central to my considerations. My essay's title, in fact, comes from Boris Pasternak's determinative formulation: "Show me your environment, and I will tell you who you are." Both place and identity are here configured into an intensely dependent relationship, and both are offered, if not as stable facts, at least as valid tropes. In "Earthworm," a poem from her recent book, A Village Life, Louise Glück seems to concur with Pasternak: "one's position determines one's feelings."

We may indeed live in the mind. But — this is essential for my argument — the mind lives in the body. And the body lives in a particular time and a particular place on the earth, making social connections, walking, loving, sometimes abusing, always taking its very nourishment from the place where it lives. Its survival depends on the environment where it lives. Or, as one talented emerging poet, G. C. Waldrep, has said, "What keeps us all from evaporating into that postmodern mist of vapor and indeterminacy is the body, of course. And music, the performative, is rooted in the body."

As a Midwestern poet, I find the issues of place and identity in the foreground of my thinking and my work. It is where I am from — small-town Missouri