Author: Richie DeMaria
It was an encounter straight out of a Robinson Jeffers poem: One late August afternoon, Environmental Health and Safety Manager Bruce Steele found a wounded hawk – in a bit of cruel divine humor – just off Bird Road. The young Coopers Hawk had two broken legs and was visibly frightened. After several attempts at flying, the hurt hawk, unable to control itself, became trapped under a canopy of Ceanothus bushes. Steele wrapped the bird in a towel and sought advice from biology professor and hawk researcher Dr. John Hafner. He then took the bird home to resuscitate it. The bird died from sustained injuries the following morning.
“To have shared some time with this hawk was a memorable experience,” Steele said. “Looking into the eyes of this injured bird, and trying to imagine what the experience was like from its perspective, inspired some one-way conversations.”
Not long after this incident, the Station Fire scorched the hills over Oxy and bronzed the Orientation Week air. Seeing an opportunity, ECLS Professor John Swift and three students from his modernist poetry course hosted a discussion on Jeffers’ “Fire On The Hills” for the parents of incoming students. Once again, a month before the Robinson Jeffers Big Read, the unbuilt environment encroached upon our built one.
What coincidences. Had Jeffers prophesied a month of mass readership and penned two pertinent and anticipatory poems to secure himself some relevance? This conspiracy could work except for the fact that the connection between Jeffers’ material and the materials of our surroundings, between his place and ours, is not coincidental but ongoing. Hurt hawks and fire in the hills are two common Californian sights; these events are just iterations of cycles. It is better to say instead that Jeffers wrote California, or that through him California was written.
At least, that’s a connection the organizers of The Big Read are hoping to make. Working with faculty, local high schools, museums, parks and bookstores – 15 organizations in all – Special Collections librarians Dale Stieber and Emily Bergman and their student staff, GEAR UP Program Assistant Leo Magallon, and resident artist Corey Madden have organized a month of programming celebrating Oxy’s very own “poet of place.” Between Oct. 1 and Nov. 7, the northeast Los Angeles community will be asked to read, re-enact and otherwise relate to Jeffers’ poetry and, as the theme goes, “the Ecologies of Poetry.” There will be poetry readings, poetry tweets, Jeffers museum exhibits, a Jeffers keynote panel, a family nature walk in Debs Park, walking tours of the L.A. River and Highland Park and, finally, a Jeffers at Occidental Day featuring interactive artwork, live music and performances, all meant to connect readers to both Jeffers’ poetry and their own surroundings, human or otherwise.
“This is a chance to connect to the place in which we live,” Stieber said. “We [Bergman and I] are quite gonzo in seizing opportunities to engage our Oxy community with our neighborhood partners.”
The Big Read comes 105 years after Jeffers graduated from Oxy. Born in what is now Pittsburgh to an austere Presbyterian minister and widower, and later educated abroad in Germany and Switzerland, John Robinson Jeffers attended the University of Western Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh) until his family moved to Los Angeles upon his father’s retirement. He then transferred to Occidental in 1903 at the age of 16. Here, he made his mark on both student publications and in theater. He edited the student newspaper The Occidental (distant relative to The Weekly), and was an active member of the Stevenson Literary Society. He performed and co-wrote a morality play entitled “Everystudent,” for which he authored lyrics to incidental music. He played the part of Tu Much Athletics, along with characters named Allfundand Frolic and Hot Aire. It was here at Occidental where he explored the comparatively undeveloped hills of Highland Park and developed a love for hiking. He graduated in 1905 at age 18, but his relationship with Occidental continued for years. Former College President Remsen Bird, for example, befriended Jeffers and his wife in the 1920s, and made frequent trips to visit them in Carmel.
After his two years at Occidental, Jeffers moved in and out of schools for graduate studies, trying literature and later medicine at USC, literature and philosophy at the University of Zurich and forestry at the University of Washington. During these many relocations he met Los Angeleno Una Call Kuster, whom he married in 1913. The two settled in their “inevitable place” Carmel, where they built a granite stone house which they named Tor House. It was at Tor House where he wrote most of his poetry, and it was in Carmel where he remained.
Until he died in 1962, Jeffers proved both a lauded poet and a scorned public figure. He met initial success with the publication of “Tamar and Other Poems in 1924,” and an expanded edition published the following year as “Roan Stallion,” “Tamar and Other Poems” elevated his status even more. The acclaim did not last, however. Audiences reeled from his strong opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II, expressed in works like the compilation “The Double Axe and Other Poems,” a collection so overtly pacifist that Random House included a publishers’ note explicitly denying any affiliation with Jeffers’ expressed views.
Jeffers’ opinions are difficult to miss. He employed an oratorical tone in most of his works, and many exhibit inhumanist sentiments – “inhumanism” being Jeffers’ word for, as he wrote in the preface to “The Double Axe and Other Poems,” “a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe.” He did not consider it a pessimist perspective, but rather a “rational” one, and he decried man’s self-involved worldview. On mankind, he wrote, “Nine-tenths of its energy [is] devoted to self-interference, self-frustration, self-incitement, self-tickling, self-worship.” One could find in Jeffers’ works a precursor to today’s green movement and find much to like, though likewise one could read them as too radical and find much to dislike, and many in his age did.
“Jeffers used narrative techniques to get his readers to experience what it means to be human in the world, and to see all the problems and all the opportunities of self-consciousness in a world that doesn’t revolve around us,” CSU Long Beach professor and co-editor of the journal “Jeffers Studies” George Hart said.
Furthermore, he was an unusual poet. Unlike the obscurantist modernist poets of his era, Jeffers wrote plainspoken free verse concerned not with humans, but their environments. In a time of complex and deliberately prickly poems like “The Waste Land,” Jeffers’ poems – humble, approachable, reverential, but also detached, dethroning and dehumanized – were unfashionable.
“He’s a very big declaiming voice, not a craftsmanly poet in the way most readers understand poetry,” Swift said. “Many of his poems are simple, some seem like unthoughtful shouts, he doesn’t play with the sophisticated effects of sound and image that we’ve been conditioned to expect by writers like his contemporaries Eliot and Stevens.”
By the end of his lifetime, Jeffers’ audience numbered much smaller than in the 1920s. His previously-anthologized works disappeared from collections, classroom discussions shifted onto other poets. Present-day scholars and eco-advocates have favorably reassessed his work, but he remains an unsung figure compared to his 1920s stature. And yet, here in 2009, in a matter of days, Oxy and its community will be neck deep in the ecologies of poetry.
How did we get here? First, a bit of background: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) started the Big Read in an effort to raise readership among Americans, especially young Americans. In the Big Read, a community (usually a city) will take one book an
d organize educational events around the author and his/her work. When the NEA decided recently to include poets in its roster of authors worth “reading bigly,” they turned to Oxy, Jeffers’ alma mater, to spread his words. Or rather, they turned to Special Collections. Stieber and Bergman have been busy ever since.
“The most difficult aspect is keeping all the balls in the air without letting any fall,” Bergman said. “Because this project has the three arms – campus, community and school – and all those entail, it’s very easy to have something fall through a crack.”
Bergman and Stieber have had to juggle coordinating both on- and off-campus events. Funded by a $20,000 NEA grant, Oxy has helped extend the reach of the Big Read program across the community. Co-sponsors include Friends of the L.A. River, the Historical Society of Southern California and the Wildlife Waystation. The Special Collections department became an overstuffed Jeffers temple in preparation, amassing poems and promotional materials, busts and Remsen Bird etchings (the former president, an accomplished caricaturist, sketched several portraits of Jeffers). Fortunately, they have had the help of a five-strong student staff and numerous faculty to sort through it all.
“Dale Stieber, the Special Collections librarian, has been working closely with myself and the other student assistants to make the whole project as marketable, relatable and successful as possible,” Anahid Yahjian (junior) said. “I think she’s made a very wise decision to employ my generation’s tech-savviness by using Twitter, Facebook and Blogspot to communicate with the Big Read’s potential audience – she often turns to the student workers for advice on the ins and outs of these social networking services, thus allowing us to actually be part of the decision-making process.”
They have even enlisted the web savvy of English Writing Professor Thomas Burkdall, who, since the start of August, has used Twitter to relay lines of Jeffers’ verse to interested readers.
“Having read the tweets of dead people such as Oscar Wilde and Jean Baudrillard, I thought Robinson Jeffers should have an opportunity to express himself using social media,” Burkdall said.
Before the Big Read has even begun, cyber Jeffers has over 40 followers – and that’s just on Twitter. The Big Read’s readership spans generations; the program has involved readers too young to otherwise have come across his poetry. The deceased poet can now count among his audience over 200 area high school students, and, thanks to Sociology Professor Dolores Trevizo, the girls of Girl Scout Troop 235.
Trevizo, whose daughter is a member of said Troop, heard about the Big Read and suggested the opportunity to the scout leader. With help from Stieber and Bergman, the Troop devised an activity at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian’s Ethnobotanical Garden: Scouts would read Jeffers’ poetry and install passages in the garden. To prepare for this, the girls, aged 13 and 14, attended an hour-long primer lecture by ECLS professor Warren Montag, and visited the Ethnobotanical Garden on Sunday, Sept. 19 to map out the gardens. On Oct. 4, the girls will install their selected verses, crafted by a graphic designer, and on Oct. 10 will attend a ceremony to dedicate a Tongva Ti’at sculpture.
“I was really moved by how Jeffers’ poetry inspired the Girl Scouts and forced them to think about environmental issues, the relationship between humans and animals, as well as Jeffers’ philosophy of inhumanism,” Trevizo said. “Most of the girls were super enthusiastic about the project. One of them, Ms. Bronwyn Adams-Cohen, said that she was honored to work on such an important project.”
This was but one of many ways the Big Read organizers hope to engage participants with the theme, “Ecologies of Poetry.” On the climactic event, the Nov. 7 Jeffers Day held at Oxy, artists, students and visitors will have the opportunity to display their own interpretations of the theme – there will be Scottish folk dancers and Andy Goldsworthy-type installations, poems read in sign language and a screening of a claymation version of Jeffers’ “Medea” done by high school students. Chief organizer of Jeffers Day, Corey Madden mentioned the idea of temporary art – ephemeral pieces made of mulch or paper that dissolves on the same day of its installation. The materials would be culled from Oxy’s campus, recycled from facilities, and their application inhumanist. As he wrote in “Carmel Point,” “people are a tide / That swells and in time will ebb, and all / Their works dissolve.”
“The Big Read itself is a big embrace of a real diversity of peoples’ responses to the invitation to think about Jeffers and think about the themes and his legacy,” Madden said.
As Hart notes, there are plenty of ways to interpret “The Ecologies of Poetry.”
“Poetry itself is an ecosystem,” he said. “Language is an environment that we exist in, and the diversity that poetry – and all of literature – exhibits is a necessary part of the ‘biodiversity’ of that language environment. Without all kinds of poetry – lyric, narrative, epic, satiric, experimental, formal, comic, tragic et cetera – our language and our consciousness would be impoverished.”
In short, poetry is never just words on a page and ecologies never just the interactions of organisms and their environments. Ecology comes from the Greek ‘oikos,’ meaning ‘home,’ and so implies the same connotations of identification and emotion, not just habitation.
“It does seem to me that literature – art itself – is an important human response to the world -always a finding of one’s place or of making one’s place,” Swift said. “With poets I think the problems of making one’s self in the world – and of making the world in which to place one’s self – are particularly urgent, because of the craft and immediacy of the form. And with Jeffers, who was a very self-conscious poet of place and nature, they’re right out in front: he’s always thinking about the connections in all things, and that’s what his poetry is about.
Could there be another connection, then, between Jeffers and Oxy, besides his having been educated here? It is significant, Madden says, that we can claim Jeffers as our own, for his ideals match well with Oxy’s.
“Oxy is an expression of Jeffers – Oxy has taken the values that he espoused in sustained programming and student activity for 75 years. Whether Jeffers created Oxy or Oxy created Jeffers, there’s a real connection between the two,” Madden said. “You can see it in UEPI, in what Bruce Steele does with trying to find ways to reduce amount of water being used on campus and in all of the programming with students trying to draw their attention here to global sustainable work.”
Jeffers’ poetry, at its heart, presents a challenge to present day readers: How do they orient themselves in relation to their environment without harming it? If Jeffers Month means anything, then Occidental ought to further reassess its own role in the environment. Oxy earned a C- grade on the 2009 College Sustainability Report Card, and, according to a 2007 UEPI report on greenhouse gas emissions, the College emits the equivalent of at least 11,871 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. One would have to drive over 26 million miles – as in 1,044 round-the-planet road trips – to produce the same amount on their own. This is not to accuse the college of hypocrisy (as in, how dare they trample upon the ideals of a green-minded graduate who attended over a century ago!) but to illustrate what challenges it faces as a forward-thinking institution. How does a college situated in a city which has, during its development, so thoroughly effaced what came before (channeling the river, altering the airspace, building highways over fault lines) harmonize with what’s left?
“We are especially aware of the environment here in Los Angeles, because despite the dirty air, the
displaced wildlife and the natural disasters, we also have the opportunity to be moved and permanently changed by the beauty so close by in the mountains, by the ocean, or in a wild park like Griffith Park,” Bergman said.
It would be a mistake to treat Occidental as its own environment, a world apart from the world. It is not often that a hawk stumbles on campus, or a wildfire burns ten miles from it, but it is a constant that our activities here have a direct effect on the environment. The bubble is imagined.
“Oxy is still a place where people can be asking these questions: ‘What is a sustainable campus in the West?'” Madden said. “That’s what I’m hoping will be the product – have students asking, ‘What should the sustainable campus of the future really look like?'”
Perhaps Jeffers would say we have gone too far. We belong, he wrote in “Shone Perishing, Republic,” to a nation that had long ago settled “in the mould of its vulgarity,” with “corruption” at its urban center. In “De Rerum Virtute,” he called man “the sick microbe.” But as Madden suggests, there is still promise in the future, promise for a humbled humanity less eager to dominate the land. Perhaps we have misread our environment all along, but the Big Read hints that maybe one day we can, like a poem, reread it afresh.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
