Our proper place: The poetry of care and loss

Likely no culture has been so ignorant and contemptuous of place as is contemporary industrialized society. We may not even qualify as a culture, since that word generally connotes a form of social organization that connects people and places through time. By that criterion, industrialized society fails miserably. Its practices of blowing away mountains to extract coal or razing forests on a continental scale to grow animal feed reveal its essential characteristics: disregard for time and contemptuousness of place. Indeed, the global economy depends fundamentally on ignoring the particular character of places and violating their physical limits.

By contrast, one of the functions of poetry is to help us discover and keep our proper place in the world. By “proper place,” I mean not our various arbitrary social locations, but rather the place of the human species within the created order. Keeping one’s place entails keeping in health the places that we physically occupy.

We find such poetry—what I call the “poetry of care and loss”—in the work of a few contemporary North American poets. While industrialization is characterized by carelessness, waste and depredation of the created order, these poems express a commitment to honoring beloved places, caring for them and, when need be, remembering and lamenting what has been lost.

These poets are direct descendants of the psalmists, who often wrote song-poems about the ordering of the world by God. A good poem, says Wendell Berry, is “the product of a convocation”; it represents multiple voices, each adding its own fresh contribution that develops and deepens through time. As Hermann Gunkel showed a century ago, the Psalms themselves are products of a convocation. They are not sui generis works of individual genius, but rather traditional compositions whose forms were largely given to the artist.

Anne Porter and Mary Oliver are two contemporary poets who acknowledge their debt to the Psalms and participate in the convocation. Consciously or not, these poets clarify what is at stake in the Psalter: nothing less than the possibility of praising God truly. Its Hebrew title is Tehilim, “Praises,” and the Psalms as a whole explore the conditions for offering authentic and convincing praise in a pain-wracked world falling daily toward death.

These poets write as creatures giving voice to other creatures. Here Porter speaks for the rosa humilis, the pasture rose, who gives “free and for nothing . . .

. . . her prickles
Her five translucent petals
And her golden eye

And so to thank her
I try to learn that dialect of silence
Which is her language
And then translate it
Into human words

As if the Lord had told me
Listen to the rose
Be the voice of the rose.

Porter translates the creatures with notes of praise, following her spiritual and poetic model, St. Francis: “Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,” she writes, and with the little peepers “when they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries.” Thus she makes audible those “smallest creatures, who do not know they have names,” as they

Praise the moist ground and every winking leaf,
And the new sun that smells of the new streams.

Like the psalmists, Porter gives praise with thunderstorms, with sun and moon, with stars