Ecologically Lush and Unfamiliar: The Deering Hour and Art in Time

The Deering Hour by Karen Elizabeth Bishop. Ornithopter Press, 2021. 81 pages. $17.

A mysterious phenomenon. A team of specialists. Everything about the landscape inside the phenomenon (known as the “shimmer”) is touched and changed by radical growth, color, mutation, from flowers to fungi to animals—deer with purple-flowering branches for antlers, an albino alligator with rows of bull shark teeth, a giant American Black bear with a human skull and embedded on the side of its own. The bear has a terrible scream.

I’m describing the movie Annihilation (2018), a science fiction/horror film directed by Alex Garland. Among other themes, the film explores the concept of cancer via the devastating mutation and growth of the mysterious phenomenon, which makes life strange. Nightmarish. Beautiful. Otherworldly.

Reading the new poetry title The Deering Hour (Ornithopter Press, 2021) by Karen Elizabeth Bishop brought Annihilation rushing back to my mind. Bishop’s is a lyrically lush collection, thronging with iridescent color and rows of teeth in unexpected places. It is thoroughly, intentionally strange, purposefully wrought in terms of sonics, image and introspection. The Deering Hour sits at the weirdly beautiful table with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Lucie Brock-Broido; it leans a velvet shoulder against phenomenology, hybridity, and its own aural intelligence.

The Deering Hour’s first poem “honeyhive” (the compound evoking Hopkins or the keenings found in medieval oral poems like “Beowulf”) opens:

ghost says i unholding swarm
leaves a beehive unmounted i

choose slope, pitch the bend,
knucklegrass and kneebend,

bees everywhere like eyes
singing. the sky against the

skull at the hard angle open
cracks, yeses blind now the

hum a bloodthinner the
sun a boxcutter, it shuts

down by silver hinge, thin
wire discordant welcomed.

The sense and the sound are overbold rather than fragile, the lines meant to be read aloud, the slant-rhymes and repetitions sweet and thick on the tongue. “Honeyhive” reminds me of homophonic translations, where the sound is what moves between languages, not the sense—and yet, and yet, the poem does something via its sound, it paints like Pollock with assonance and consonance, concludes “we consume what will not / hold, wordlike and storied.” There is something to be said for an opening poem that defamiliarizes, that asks its reader to be bewildered, to sit with their own unknowing. This is our daily experience with language and the world, at every level.

Other elements in The Deering Hour evoke Milton for me—the couplet-sized poem “Luciferin”: “was it you or the foxfire / that gasped in the night?” that links bioluminescent fungi (foxfire) across etymology with the Latin word Lucifer, meaning light-bearing—the word “decreation,” appearing in the poem “inflorescence”: “decreation is an empty field where tall / grasses take root.” Decreation was the theological-existential threat in Milton’s Paradise Lost—could God possibly uncreate what God had created good, but which was no longer oriented toward good? I mention these brushes with the Miltonic in order to highlight how our physical world and study of ecology is touched by deeper texts and languages; we have historical forces and traditions to reckon with, concepts driven and fed by centuries of time, when it comes to our thinking about climate and ecology. 

The Deering Hour is deeply ecologically concerned, wooing its reader with its lack of overt “ecopoetic” ambition and marketing and instead being deeply interested in and attentive to the natural world. The poem “interstellar,” for example, frames an experience at a lake as otherworldly as well as endangered:

& there we were interstellar,
prone, and paddled out to the middle
of the lake, two islands between us
and the receding shoreline swamped
with cattails and night frogs and the
corpse of one sunfish, belly up and swollen

just where the murky water turns to mud.
so that coming down the yard toward
the dock, the air smells thick with garbage,
but it’s the stench of giving up that hangs
heavy about the house, eyes bulging,
body arched skyward, oh just take me already

from these dark waters, I can’t bear to look
any longer upon these dark waters, oh
lord, take me before the night is through.

The lyric (and here I mean the song of the poem, the vocative “oh lord, take me…”) meets a defamiliarizing narrative in “intersteller,” a title that suggests a transposition of space and time—and water is, indeed a substitute for space, used as training for a gravity-light environment. I feel shaken awake by Bishop’s poetry. I had surely been sleeping; I had let the waves social tragedy and disaster on the news wash over me until I am not really seeing the world. Poems like “interstellar,” “leaf-lung,” and “field notes from the biological station” pull me back, remind me of the wildness of our natural environment, remind me that humans are not apart, we are a part-of nature, and strange, too. 

The poem “this plant with teeth” works similarly and harks (for this reader) to Annihilation’s flower-antlered twin deer, turning in perfect synchronicity in the film: 

this plant with teeth
flowers overjawing
mouth lips heaven-
ward turned like two
new deer in profile
against the treebank

there is a shared identification with the plant’s flowering, or a vocalization of the plant itself in the final lines that merges with the image of the deer:

this
morning i overflower
this morning i over-
flower this morning i
leap antlers blooming.

Who are we, the poem asks, to parse the world out like shipping containers or mail orders? The blending and entanglement of the natural world pervades The Deering Hour, as in the eponymous poem and the poem “the bright spot” with the epigraph, “for my grandfather, / who killed a deer to his nazi prisoners could eat.”

The poem’s final section is a long, sectioned hybrid poem entitled “Kilpisjärvi.” In the “Notes” section at the conclusion of The Deering Hour, Bishop writes that “Kilpisjärvi” “reworks several fragments from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, and that two sections “were written by the Augury working group at the 2018 Bioart Society’s Field Notes laboratory at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station.” This twenty-three page section—journalistic, philosophical, with prose lines—is enriching for those who find kinship in the writing of Thoreau and others, collaging technical instructions and including notes that only a poet could write: “Between bird and branch, the sky. Between bird and bird, the sky.”

The Deering Hour will help you turn differently towards the world around you, the world that encompasses your every word and action. After reading it, you will not be able to claim—as I heard a writer once claim—that an environment had been “used up,” and was no good to them as a writer anymore. It is not use that makes leaf and antler glitter—it is themselves, it is our attention.

Art in Time by Cole Swensen. Nightboat Books, 2021. 145 pages. $18.95.

“The aim of this book,” reads the first epigraph of Art in Time, “is to change landscape from a noun to a verb.” And what better writer to put this thought into practice than poet and scholar Cole Swensen, author of over ten books of poetry (I think fondly of The Glass Age, centered on the phenomenon and art of glass) and “as many translations” from the French as well as the co-edited poetry anthology American Hybrid. Swensen works adeptly across languages, chronologies, histories, genres, and in Art in Time meets the reader fully in the contemporary scene of interstitial art. 

Swensen’s website describes Art in Time as “Twenty lyrical essays on landscape art that overflows the form.” There is an immediate formal destabilizing when one enters the reading space of these essays—lines grow short, suddenly reading like poetry, or words gap across the pages in an intentional use of visual caesuras. Art in Time is a meditation on art that is itself art—that partakes in the variety of ways art helps us see or attend to the world newly. In Swensen’s introduction, subtitled “An argument against timeless art,” Swensen speaks to a physical experience of encountering landscapes “vastness,” and the “fusion of seer and seen/scene.” In Swensen’s reading, the artists explored in Art in Time—from Agnes Varda to David Hockney to Zao Wou-ki, Gustav Limt, Sally Mann, Christo & Jeanne-Claude—both unmoor and anchor their artistic approaches and practices. Writes Swensen:

These artists…have engaged the landscape genre in a fluid way, a way that puts the landscape back into motion, and in doing so, they have found alternatives to some of the presumptions and practices of landscape art common to Euro-centric contexts, such as the use of linear perspective, in which the proper viewing position can only be occupied by one person at a time, thus implicitly supporting hierarchical social and political systems and the regimes of appropriation, colonization, and exclusion that go with them.

At the same time, the projects of these artists “insist on specificity,” on an art “conjugated into the present.” It is these works of art, notes Swensen, “that have the most potential to play a role in keeping the culture responsive to its immediate demands and needs.”

Though familiar with Swensen’s formal dexterity and attention to hybrid writing, I was startled anew by the texture of the page as soon as I began reading the first essay—the line breaks of the prose, the swift dives into poetry: gaps, breaks, spaces, fragments, ekphrasis. The first essay on Willem de Kooning “Composed Windows” opens:

Field: if there’s a woman in a garden, there’s a field in shredded color or a woman in an arc of garden peeling backward. If there’s a fields, it’s only color outward, if the body of the garden were ever hurled open, its howl of color tearing the horizon into hundreds of days
each day
Willem de Kooning
stowed away
on a British freighter heading for Argentina
(hiding in the engine room for the twelve days it took to cross the Atlantic) and disembarked at Newport News in 1926, his mother having once again violently assaulted him, and it was, he decided, time to become bohemian.

Now you see what I mean when I say that Swensen is writing art of art—the criticism is ekphrasis. We are given no less an image and a feeling in Swensen’s description of “field” than we see in De Kooning’s Pink Landscape (1938—“it was morning and it was going to stay that way”) or Door to the River (1960).

The textured and collaged feeling is entirely Swensen’s effect, and the “Notes” declare,

Other than titles, foreign words, and self-referential words, all phrases or passages in italics are the words, either written or spoken, of the artists referenced or of someone interviewing them or writing on or to them…Phrases in quotation marks, on the other hand, are entirely imagined and/or invented statements, even though they may seem to be attributed to the artist or another—friend, dealer, viewer, etc…

When Swensen discusses Agnès Varda, she begins with poetry: “Landscape of rain / raining down a street…/ Landscape of later.” Swensen translates Varda’s touchstone film of French New Wave cinema—La Pointe Courte—into lines that shimmer like Varda’s black and white “background” of “salted brittle”:

out there
the boats
just a liquid line of lighted windows
a candle bright upon a table

Landscape of sand dunes
the sun cut into seagulls.
Landscape in the shape of a breeze.
Breeze in the shape of its trees.

Swensen’s words do things, translate a world even as Varda’s film do, revealing a landscape of images whose sum is greater than their parts. Swensen touches on the marginalized subjects of Varda’s films, and the political lacuna—women’s rights, civil rights, and notes: “One of the things I’m particularly drawn to in Varda’s work is the way she so often presented landscape as accidental, incidental—no big deal, inevitable—but then you gradually realize that it’s the very center and composed of openings…”

The final essay—a favorite of mine—considers Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s art installation Running Fence, which Swensen calls “A kite 25 miles in flight. Ignited by the sun.”

“The fence is not the work of art,” says Christo in a short film for Smithsonian Magazine, “the work of art is all the togetherness.” Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s website describes the structure, placement, and collaborative labor of Running Fence: 

5.5 meters (18 feet) high, 39.4 kilometers (24.5 miles) long, extending east-west near Freeway 101, north of San Francisco, on the private properties of 59 ranchers, following the rolling hills and dropping down to the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay. The Running Fence was completed on September 10, 1976.

The art project consisted of 42 months of collaborative efforts, the ranchers’ participation, eighteen public hearings, three sessions at the Superior Courts of California, the drafting of a 450-page Environmental Impact Report and the temporary use of the hills, the sky and the ocean.

All expenses for the temporary work of art were paid by Christo and Jeanne-Claude through the sale of studies, preparatory drawings and collages, scale models and original lithographs. The artists did not accept sponsorship of any kind.

“How did the birds respond?” wonders Swensen, 

Especially the raptors and vultures who spend their lives riding the currents of air, showing that the atmosphere is also constructed of hills, slopes, curves, valleys, moving not unlike the fence in its slow streak of geographic sweep, a lighthouse drawn with a long phosphorescent brush—what did it look like in the moonlight? What did it look like from the moon? And then suddenly all the animals for miles around, awake. Making a thin line drawn in lime arrive at a great wall that walled nothing in.

Swensen describes the effect of Running Fence on the animal community of humans as well—those for and those opposed; everyone had a role to play and perform when it came to creating Running Fence, from installing the steel poles, to hanging the steel cable, to stretching the white nylon fabric. Running Fence was “designed for complete removal,” and the artists left no trace of it “on the hills of Sonoma and Marin Counties.”

Swensen’s musing exist at the intersection of criticism, meditation, and collaboration. It is fitting that Art in Time closes on the Running Fence—a work of art that is community muscle, that is job creation for the local community, that involved ranchers’ permissions and participation, that Californians driving by could see from the road—the materials light, time, weather. 

Art in Time is a brilliant foray into twenty-one artists’ films, paintings, photographs, and art installations—and the lives out of which the work grows. Critical and poetic, sensitive and probing, Swensen reminds us of the community, the labor, and the commitment a life in art both requires and creates.