1  

Margaret Ronda Department of English, UC-Davis

Chapter 3 “The Advancing Signs of the Air”: Crisis-Consciousness in Carson, Commoner,

and Ashbery (Work-in-progress; please do not cite without permission)

What can be sensed about ecological interconnection and environmental crisis by

attending to what John Ashbery calls the “advancing signs of the air”?1 In this chapter, I

argue that Ashbery’s poems of the late sixties and early seventies, including Rivers and

Mountains (1966), The Double Dream of Spring (1970), and especially Three Poems (1972),

explore strange senses of environmental consciousness, grounded in modes of

perception that are somatic and diffuse rather than rational and clear. His poetry often

concerns what Elaine Scarry has called “not sentience but sentience rolled back”—the

“quasi-percipient, the slightly percipient, the almost percipient, the not yet percipient”—

moments of environmental registering and interiorizing without full awareness.2 This

period saw the dawning of what many U.S. environmental historians call the “age of

environmentalism”—an era, beginning in the mid-1960s, where public perception of

environmental crisis in the United States grew pervasive, leading to a wide range of

grassroots campaigns, governmental legislation and extensive media coverage. Yet

Ashbery’s poems decidedly sidestep—even actively parody—any portrayal of ethical or

restorative environmental response, while remaining open and attentive to these

“advancing signs” of ecological disturbance borne on the air. In this sense, Ashbery

                                                                                                               1  John Ashbery, “Fragment,” in John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987, ed. Mark Ford (New York, Library of America, 2008) 243. Subsequent poems cited are from this volume unless otherwise specified. 2  Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations 57 (Winter 1997) 90-115, 106.

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articulates a profoundly different itinerary and function for poetry in the face of

burgeoning ecological crisis than “green” models of environmental consciousness

propose. To read his work in relation to the environmental logics of this period is thus

to take notice of the ways many of its novel conceptions—invisible hazards, everyday

atmospheric toxicity, population growth—emerge through half-felt perceptions, carried

on the air—a “breath / Of becoming before becoming may be seen” (533). While these

poems do not quite chime with our contemporary conception of atmosphere as the

master-signifier of planetary ecological calamity, they insistently locate in the air a

sense of looming but undefinable crisis in which “everything and everybody were

included after all” (278).

Taking up the challenge laid down recently by Chris Nealon in The Matter of

Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011) to read seventies Ashbery as

invested in the material conditions of crisis, I am interested, here, in the ways his poetry

evokes almost-intangible senses of danger, harm, contagion as ambient ecological

conditions of the present. I want to extend Nealon’s claim to point to a complementary

form of crisis-thinking in Ashbery—one that attends not to the spectacular but to the

diffuse, not to the event of economic collapse but to the partial and uneven perceptibility

of ecological calamity. In this sense, how his poetry directly represents pollution or

population concerns is less relevant than what his atmospheres might reveal, in their

affective textures and densities, both about the environmental history of its present and

about poetry’s methods of sensing. In Ashbery’s work of this period, poetry is figured as

a particularly sensitive register—we might say a barometer—of what Raymond

Williams terms “practical consciousness”: “what is actually being lived, and not only

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what it is thought is being lived.”3 This poetry unfolds an affirmative embrace of

ecological uncertainty that involves neither critique nor attempt to repair damage, nor

even an attempt to fully understand. The work of these poems is to capture the

incipience of the present before it folds into retrospective clarity—the “surface on which

a new phrase may be written before it rejoins history” (315). Ashbery’s interest, in these

works, is an attempt to define how “the insistent now” feels as it just “eludes our

grasp”—a sensation, prickly and tense, as if something is on the verge of happening, or

something is barely able to be perceived.

In turn, this chapter examines how these poems offer different windows into the

emergent senses and sensings of ecological crisis of this environmentally-minded era.

Environmental historian Samuel Hays has influentially described a cultural shift in the

United States from an interest, in the early 1960s, on conservation efforts, reflecting

popular interest in “outdoor recreation, wildlands and open space,” to an increasing

focus on “the adverse impact of industrial development, with a special focus on water

and air pollution” by the later 1960s (55).4 J. Clarence Davies points out in his 1970

book The Politics of Pollution, “The amount of money and attention being devoted today

to the problem of pollution is without historical precedent.”5 At the same time, concerns

over the misalignment between population growth and limited resources were reaching

a peak, spurred on largely by Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 The Population Bomb. The

first Earth Day, in 1970, demonstrated not only the immense reach of environmentalism

                                                                                                               3  Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) 131. 4  Samuel Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 55. Also see J.R. McNeill, “Ideas and Politics,” in Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2001), 325-55, for a largely pessimistic view of the role of environmental activism in improving environmental conditions.     5  J. Clarence Davies III, The Politics of Pollution (New York: Pegasus, 1970), 24.

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in American culture but also articulated a generalized sense of crisis that required a

more unified response. As Adam Rome writes, “Earth Day … convinced many

Americans that pollution, sprawl, nuclear fallout, pesticide use, wilderness preservation,

waste disposal, and population growth were not separate issues: All were facets of a far-

reaching ‘environmental crisis.’”6 Yet while historians have documented how the

environmental movement coalesced in this era, the question of how ecological crisis was

perceived as an everyday phenomenon during this period, how it shaped daily

experience, is more complex and difficult to measure. How might we characterize the

structure of feeling of emerging ecological crisis, as what Williams calls “a kind of

thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it

can become fully articulate”? (131)

To conceptualize these incipient states of environmental consciousness, I turn first to

two canonical texts of this era: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Barry

Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971). These may seem counterintuitive models, of

course, because these bestselling books—particularly Silent Spring, widely regarded as

the single most significant text in the modern environmental movement—were so

instrumental in raising ecological awareness of synthetic pesticides, pollution, and other

environmental dangers, leading to a host of legislative successes and the advent of

popular forms of environmental advocacy and activism. Yet even as these books muster

a masterful array of empirical data and offers urgent calls to action, they also detail

more recalcitrant forms of environmental experience. Perhaps most importantly, both

Silent Spring and The Closing Circle highlight the profound disconnect between

                                                                                                               6  See Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 10. Rome argues that “Earth Day gave environmental activism a name” and helped to create a single movement from a series of activist issues.  

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environmental appreciation and the capacity to change everyday modes of living, in and

through which most actual ecological relations occur. Carson and Commoner explore

various forms of everyday ecological bewilderment—signs that are difficult to

interpreted, symptoms and sensations without clear causal moorings. Such

formulations, I argue, are not reducible to the frameworks of awakening and ethical

action that are central to canonical ecocritical definitions of the phrase “environmental

consciousness.”

The Vicissitudes of Environmental Consciousness

The concept of environmental consciousness has been a central tenet of literary

ecocriticism of the past twenty-five years. As developed by “green” ecocritics such as

Jonathan Bate, Karl Kroeber, Scott Slovic, and Lawrence Buell, environmental

consciousness describes a heightened awareness of the nonhuman surroundings that a

given text explores in its themes, patterns, images, and narrative structures, and also

the effects such portrayals produce in the reader. Drawing largely on Romantic and

Transcendentalist traditions, this critical concept evokes wakefulness, a lucid awareness

of the self’s situation within larger, more-than-human surroundings. Slovic writes: “By

confronting face-to-face the separate realm of nature, by becoming aware of its

otherness, the writer implicitly becomes more deeply aware of his or her own

dimensions, limitations of form and understanding, and processes of grappling with the

unknown.”7 Literary tropes of first-person encounter, empirical and phenomenological

observation, and increasing comprehension of natural world and self alike are central

                                                                                                               7  Scott Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing (Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1998) 4.

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features of this concept. Ecocritics also stress the alternative to consciousness as a state

of slumber or ignorance from which the speaker must be roused by an engagement with

the text. Buell calls this the “environmental unconscious” in his Writing for an

Endangered World.8 This state of somnolescence is personal, but it is also cultural, a

collective alienation from the natural world produced by industrialized modernity.

Following Thoreau’s injunction in Walden that “we must learn to reawaken and keep

ourselves awake,” the environmental literary text attempts to overcome this alienated

modern condition through its conscious attention to the natural world.9

Environmental consciousness, defined along these lines, necessarily involves a

pedagogical dimension, both for its speaking subject and for its reader. To become

environmentally conscious is to be educated into the workings of the nonhuman world

via the mediating powers of the text. This education into one’s surroundings has, as

Bates puts it, a “medicinal” charge, wherein the speaker or characters (and,

subsequently, the reader) are taught not only to appreciate their surroundings but to be

more moral and aesthetically enriched through this awareness.10 Bate, who reads

Wordsworth as exemplary figure in a “historical continuity of a tradition of

environmental consciousness,” argues for “the proposition that the way in which

William Wordsworth sought to enable his readers better to enjoy or to endure life was

by teaching him to look at and dwell in the natural world” (9, 4). The primary lesson,

according to this green modality of criticism, concerns re-integration and belonging. As

Kroeber asserts, Romantic poets “believed that humankind belonged in, could and should

                                                                                                               8  Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003) 18.  9  Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) 73. 10  Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991) 15.

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be at home within, the world of natural processes.”11 Writers such as Wordsworth and

Shelley (and, in an American context, Thoreau, Muir, Dillard, Leopold, and Lopez)

elaborate this sense of belonging by portraying an abiding connection between the

patterns of the natural world and those of the human mind. For these writers, these

critics insist, both the natural environment and the human mind innately tend toward

balance and harmony, a tendency that the ecologically-oriented literary text can restore

in the reader.

If a textual encounter with environmental consciousness can impart a restorative

relationship to one’s own mind, it should also induce the reader to re-engage more

attentively with her daily surroundings. As Buell pointedly asks, “Must literature

always lead us away from the physical world, never back to it?”12 In this ecocritical

model, attention to the ecological dimensions of a literary text should finally draw the

reader away from the text into the real field, inspiring the reader to undertake her own

natural encounters.13 At the same time, environmental consciousness suggests a

recognition not only of the beauty of the natural environment but of its endangered,

fragile conditions. An ecologically-oriented text, according to Scott Knickerbocker,

offers “the power to nudge consciousness to a more ecologically ethical state, which in

turn shapes behavior.”14 Consciousness in this sense is nearly synonymous with

                                                                                                               11  Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 5. 12  Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996) 11. 13 Here’s Slovic’s description of his own practice of ecocritical engagement: “I … value the complementarity of literary experience and direct sensory experience, and my understanding of what Thoreau, Dillard, Abbey, Berry, and Lopez have achieved in their writing derives not only from hours spent cooped up with heaps of books and papers, but from what happens when I put down the literature and step outside” (18-19).  14  Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012) 18.

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conscience, with the development of an ethical relation to the natural world that might

require remediative action. Here, too, the textual encounter alone is only the beginning,

as it may require the reader to change her entire orientation to her surroundings and

engage in new forms of ethical behavior, including undertaking environmental activism

to foster political changes. As Slovic writes, “nature writing is a ‘literature of hope’ in its

assumption that the elevation of consciousness may lead to wholesome political change”

(18). To this end, ecocriticism has often highlighted the testimonial quality of the

literary text as a document that leads to the pursuit of environmental justice in various

forms. It has also dovetailed with environmental histories of the American postwar

period that have employed this “archetypal narrative of the rise of environmental

awareness,” as Adam Rome puts it in his study of suburban American

environmentalism, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, to characterize social response to

anthropogenic environmental change.15

In all these ways, environmental consciousness invokes a transformational

encounter from which the reader emerges newly “responsive and responsible” to her

surroundings (Bate 39). Such epiphanic encounters with the grandeur and extravagance

of the natural world, from Marvell’s pastoral bower to Thoreau’s sublime awakening on

Ktaadn, are a crucial part of environmental literary tradition. Yet as Ashbery points out

in his Other Traditions, there are other forms of environmentally-oriented writing, such

as the poetry of John Clare, which offer something less outsized, more scaled to the

everyday: “a distillation of the natural world with all its beauty and pointlessness, its

                                                                                                               15  Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 5. Rome describes this narrative as follows: “the introduction of a new product or process, welcomed as a miracle, that people eventually come to see as the source of disturbing environmental problems. That is the story of DDT and nuclear power and detergents—and that is the story of tract housing,” the central focus of his study (5).    

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salient and boring features preserved intact.”16 Ashbery writes that in Clare’s work,

“Unlike Wordsworth’s exalted rambles in The Prelude, there is no indication that all this

is leading up to something, that the result will be an enriching vision, a placing of man

in harmonious relation to his God-created surroundings” (17). In turn, this anti-

epiphanic, non-teleological approach suggests different possibilities for literary

examinations of the concept of consciousness itself, one that might engage less

“exalted,” more ordinary forms of perception.17 Such writing often involves the detailing

of momentary sensations that never quite add up or lead somewhere. At the same time,

Ashbery’s poetry reveals some of the ways this everyday (or “practical”) environmental

consciousness might register the new kinds of ecological disturbances arising in the late

1960s and early 1970s. We might discover antecedents to Ashbery’s explorations in the

environmental writings of Carson and Commoner, both of whom diagnose and dwell in

the complexities of what Carson calls our “mesmerized state” in the face of

environmental threats.18

Dark Enchantment and “Mesmerized States”

As Carson points out near the end of Silent Spring, “Most of us walk unseeing through

the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes

terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us” (249). On one hand, her book

                                                                                                               16  John Ashbery, Other Traditions (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001) 11. 17  Angus Fletcher’s description of Ashbery as a writer of the “environment-poem”—a “genre that neither writes about the surrounding world, thematizing it, nor analytically represents that world, but actually shapes the poem to be an Emersonian or esemplastic circle”—derives in large part from his reading of Ashbery as in sustained dialogue with John Clare’s poetics (9). See “Ashbery’s Clare” in A New Theory for American Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004), 57-74.  18  Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962) 12.

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is a sustained attempt to awaken readers from this state of ecological unawareness, to

produce by way of empirical data and detailed description the kind of outraged, active

environmental consciousness that ecocritics such as Slovic laud. But on the other hand,

Silent Spring offers an extended diagnosis of the various forms of inattention and

bewilderment that characterize modern relations to ecological surroundings. I want to

tarry with these stranger elements of Silent Spring, particularly Carson’s descriptions

that point to a more diffuse or dreamlike sense of “environmental consciousness.” Rather

than cataloging anew the effectiveness of Silent Spring’s rhetorical strategies in effecting

political change—dimensions of the text which have been justly celebrated for fifty

years—I explore how it describes experiences of unknowing, disorientation, and the

incipient sensing of calamity before they dawn into full awareness or active response.

Carson asks her reader to attend to an ecological present whose contours are neither

familiar nor intelligible, and to see themselves as part of a mysterious network of

relations connected by shared susceptibility to various forms of toxicity and harm. To

do so, she invokes a fairy-tale world of enchantment, evil spells, and bewitched

victims—images that form, I argue, the diagnostic core of Silent Spring. Here Bruno

Bettelheim’s idea serves as useful guide for approaching the enchanted portraits of

ecological degradation in Carson’s work: “fairy-tale motifs are not neurotic symptoms,

something one is better off understanding rationally so that one can rid oneself of

them.”19

The celebrated opening chapter of Silent Spring begins with a scene of blissful

environmental coexistence: “There once was a town in the heart of America where all

life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings” (13). Carson’s descriptions of a

                                                                                                               19  Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (1976; New York: Vintage 2010) 19.

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bucolic agrarian landscape, full of “prosperous farms,” “great ferns and wildflowers,” and

abundant animal life, soon take a darker turn. She writes:

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by the new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. (13-14)

Carson goes on to describe the “strange stillness” of the woods and trees and farms

surrounding the town, as the animals and birds are mysteriously dying. What has

happened here? Carson directs attention to the visible remnants of a particular

substance: “In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a

white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like

snow upon the roofs and lawns, the fields and streams” (14). In the closing lines, Carson

offers the moral of the tale: “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of

new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”

Lawrence Buell describes these scenes as an initiating example of “the shock of

awakened perception,” a central trope of “toxic discourse” that perfectly inverts the

ecocritical trope of environmental consciousness (Writing 35). Such scenes produce “an

awakening to the horrified realization that there is no protective environmental blanket,

leaving one to feel dreadfully wronged. Then follows a gamut of possible reactions:

outrage, acquiescence, impotence, denial, desperation” (35-36). Yet an “awakening” to

deepened environmental consciousness and the passionate responses that Buell catalogs

are precisely what never happens in this opening fable. Though the “white granular

powder” is identified here as the causal agent, this powder appears not as the product of

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chemical corporations, agricultural industry, or even consumer choice, but as something

far stranger and less comprehensible. We learn little, by chapter’s end, about the

powder, and less still about why and how “the people had done it themselves.” Carson

never describes the townspeople recognizing their prior ignorance and awakening to

the revelation of their culpability. Instead, this opening fable substitutes one form of

enchantment, the pastoral opening and its fiction of harmonious coexistence, for

another, the strange and shadowy spell of ecological degradation. And if both reader

and townspeople remain, by the end of this opening chapter, firmly in the grip of the

fable’s enchantment, Carson’s book suggests that this is, in fact, the strange condition of

everyday ecological consciousness in postwar America. Being mystified—neither wholly

ignorant nor “awake” in Buell’s sense—is the everyday norm rather than a strange

fiction.

Silent Spring goes on to depict the strange forms of ecological bewilderment

characteristic of daily postwar American life, where “evil spells” and “mysterious

maladies” abound, while causes cannot be easily ascertained. Carson describes daily,

slow, often invisible, and pervasive exposure to contamination that lies everywhere

around us, hidden in seemingly innocent places. Like the child offered a poisonous apple

or pricked by a tainted spindle, Carson’s citizen wanders daily amidst lurking hazards

disguised as familiar items. Describing the everyday American’s “birth-to-death contact

with dangerous chemicals” as akin to “the constant dripping of water that in turn wears

away the hardest stone,” Carson declares that “probably no person is immune to contact

with this spreading contamination unless he lives in the most isolated situation

imaginable” (173-74). In many of the scenarios Carson describes, there is no visible

“granular powder” to be found; the toxins remain invisible or difficult to detect by a

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non-expert, seeped into water, soil, plants, or everyday domestic products. Unable to

point to any single event or culprit, the average citizen who experiences some form of

toxic effect often has no clear means by which to comprehend it. In part, Carson

explains, this is because the causes of ecological degradation by pesticide use are

disaggregated from their effects, so that the unintended consequences of spraying occur

weeks, months, even years later. As Carson writes, “We are accustomed to look for the

gross and immediate effect and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in

such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard” (190).

The temporal and spatial dispersal of these hazards—what Rob Nixon calls Carson’s

“extended view of risk’s time frame”—precisely elude moments of clear awakening or

total comprehension.20

Nowhere are Carson’s descriptions more darkly enchanted than in her portrayals

of the world of insecticides and other everyday poisons. Modern ecological systems,

Carson suggests, have been placed under an “evil spell” by chemists, agricultural

engineers, and corporations, from which it will be difficult to awaken:

The world of systematic insecticides is a weird world, surpassing the imaginings of the brothers Grimm—perhaps most closely akin to the cartoon world of Charles Addams. It is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairy tales has become the poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed. It is a world where a flea bites a dog, and dies because the dog’s blood has been made poisonous, where an insect may die from vapors emanating from a plant it has never touched, where a bee may carry poisonous nectar back to its hive and presently produce poisonous honey. (39)

As in a fairy tale, the dark magic is effective but also produces unexpected results. In

this case, the results reveal more about the complex workings of an ecosystem than the

chemists themselves understood. This is, of course, a powerful theme of Silent Spring,

                                                                                                               20  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011) xi.

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that modern science and consumer industries labor in ignorance of the intricate

interactions of the web of life, and that these complex interconnections are now being

revealed under the sign of contamination. But instead of merely demystifying these

workings, Carson insists on the necessity of the fairy-tale motif. Only the enchanted

framework of the fairy tale, according to the logic of Silent Spring, can accurately

capture the ecological realities of the present.

Perhaps the most powerful chapter of Silent Spring in terms of this language of

sinister enchantment is Chapter 11, “Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias,” which moves

from the world of pesticides to the everyday forms of contamination in domestic

products. As she writes:

If a huge skull and crossbones were suspended above the insecticide department the customer might at least enter it with the respect normally accorded death-dealing materials. But instead the display is homey and cheerful, and, with the pickles and olives across the aisle and the bath and laundry soaps adjoining, the rows upon rows of insecticides are displayed. Within easy reach of a child’s exploring hands are chemicals in glass containers. If dropped to the floor by a child or careless adult everyone nearby could be splashed with the same chemical that sent spraymen using it into convulsions. (174, original italics)

Here we glimpse another central theme of Silent Spring: a sustained critique of the

various industries that not only produce death-dealing chemicals but deliberately deny

or obfuscate their risks for humans and nonhumans alike. Carson describes a topsy-

turvy world in the local supermarket, where poisons are cheerily sold to consumers in

the guise of useful products. The everyday American is manipulated by various

industries into believing in the safety of these various chemicals and products, if s/he

thinks of them at all. “Lulled by the soft sell and the hidden persuader, the average

citizen is seldom aware of the deadly materials with which he is surrounding himself;

indeed, he may not realize he is using them at all” (174). Carson produces here a

redirected version of Cold War paranoia about shadowy enemies infiltrating everyday

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life to spread their ideology or cause harm to ordinary citizens. In this case, the enemy

is the very government agencies, chemical corporations, and agricultural industries

whose job is to promote and protect the food supply and the consumer’s health and

domestic comfort. Thus we see the emergence, in Silent Spring, of a diffuse and ambient

form of postwar paranoia in which one’s daily sustenance, everyday products, and

nonhuman surroundings are all potential sources of harm, and where industrial and

governmental agencies purvey untrustworthy information. Searching out the enemy

will not necessarily break the spell or provide answers; instead, we learn how pervasive

and yet dispersed the threat remains.

In turn, Silent Spring evokes a state of environmental consciousness that is

diffusely anxious, neither wholly oblivious nor vigilant. The average citizen, Carson

proposes, senses that something is environmentally amiss but never fully knows. Like

the characters in a fairy tale, the citizen wanders perplexed through a world that seems

mysteriously bewitched. Carson produces a model of ecological toxicity threaded into

daily life in ways that elude “awakening,” and that instead generate a sense of incipient

anxiety or unease that must be “shrugged off”: “It is human nature to shrug off what

may seem to us a vague threat of future disaster” (194). In these senses, Silent Spring

remains resistant to ecocritical models of environmental consciousness, with their stress

on transformative encounter and increasing understanding of one’s surroundings. What

Silent Spring reveals, instead, is the extent to which modern ecological existence is a

matter of what Anne-Lise François has called “uncounted experience,” an ethos not of

acknowledgment and action but of “weightless, minimally assertive, nonemphatic

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encounters”—encounters so minimal they verge on the “missed.”21 Carson’s work

foregrounds the impossibility of total vigilance against the risk of contamination, given

not only the myriad possibilities for potential impact but the interested parties colluding

to continue these practices. If the overall rhetorical tone of Silent Spring is one of

empirical explanation and calls to action, the mood is that of anxiety and grimness in the

face of ecological uncertainty.

At the same time, Carson’s book, with its emphasis on the dark enchantment of

ecological disturbance, suggests something more strange with respect to environmental

consciousness than mere ignorance or repression, more complex than pessimism or even

ambient anxiety. If anything, the environmental consciousness she maps here is that of

the child. Bruno Bettelheim astutely describes in The Uses of Enchantment how fairy tales

speak to the “existential anxieties and dilemmas” of the child: “the child is subject to

desperate feelings of loneliness and isolation, and he often experiences mortal anxiety.

More often than not, he is unable to express these feelings in words, or he can do so

only by indirection: fear of the dark, of some animal, anxiety about his body” (10).

Carson’s portrayals of strange poisons and spellbound citizens indicate that when it

comes to ecological interconnection, we collectively remain like the child, perplexed and

anxious, for whom the “most important experiences and reactions remain subconscious”

(18). One of the most powerful instances of this childlike consciousness is Carson’s

assertion in the opening parable that “the people had done it themselves.” This

assertion, which points to the unintentional nature of the contamination and elicits a

vague, but unclear, sense of guilt, illustrates the kind of consciousness that Carson’s

book diagnoses—one in which all members of American society bear some

                                                                                                               21  Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 60.

  17  

responsibility for ecological degradation, but how that responsibility should be

adjudicated remains unclear. Such conscience remains at a far remove from the forms of

righteous or engaged response that ecocritics discover in a variety of literary texts.

Instead it evokes the bewilderment and causal uncertainty of the fabular child, who is at

once innocent and yet in some way responsible for her punishment.

Of course, Bettelheim’s work also claims that the “uses of enchantment” are to be

found in the narrative arc of the fairy-tale, which leads the child reader through tales of

harm toward the closure of fulfillment and impossible odds overcome. Carson’s fairy

tales, instead, deliberately leave the reader suspended in the midst of the story—in the

poisoned forest, eating the toxic apple, overwhelmed by a strange sickness. The dark

enchantment of Carson’s book offers its readers a sense of lingering “not quite

knowing,” as in Bettelheim’s description: “fairy tales enrich the child’s life and give it an

enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked

their wonder on him” (19). As I have suggested here, Carson uses fairy tale motifs not

merely as a rhetorical flourish, but to offer a precise account of ecological being amidst

new, scientifically-produced forms of mystery and dread, forms that will never permit

full apprehension despite their genesis in the realms of laboratory and production line.

As Bettelheim writes, fairy tales “speak to [the child’s] unconscious, give body to his

unconscious anxieties, and relieve them, without this ever coming to conscious

awareness” (15). In this case, however, Carson diagnoses these anxieties without fully

relieving them, intimating instead the impossibility of ever fully escaping this spell.

The Air and the Ecosphere

  18  

Though it does not elaborate on Carson’s discourse of enchantment, Barry Commoner’s

1971 Closing the Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology, written a decade after Silent Spring,

furthers its examinations of ecological complexity in a variety of ways. Like Carson,

Commoner emphasizes the delocalizing dimensions of ecology, its irreducibility to the

local or isolated place, species, or phenomenon. As Commoner famously puts it in the

first of his four Laws of Ecology: “Everything is Connected to Everything Else,”

extending this sense of interconnection to the “ecosphere” as a whole.22 While Silent

Spring focuses attention on the systemic and to a large degree unknown ecological

effects of pesticides and herbicides, Commoner’s book offers a more global vision of

ecology and discusses a wider array of environmental problems, from pollution to

overpopulation to the nuclear threat. Bringing together these various threads into a

unified portrait of “the environmental crisis,” Commoner describes a threat that is more

generalized and multifaceted than Carson’s work—underscored by Commoner’s

insistence on the term crisis, less prominent in Silent Spring.

Commoner follows Carson, however, in emphasizing the degree to which full

comprehension of “the environmental crisis” remains elusive, in spite of overwhelming

public interest in environmental questions by the late 1960s and early 1970s (as his

opening chapter’s discussion of the runaway success of Earth Day underscores).23

Despite immense progress in environmental legislation in the years following Silent

Spring, including the 1964 Wilderness Act, the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the

                                                                                                               22  Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Man, Nature, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971), 33. 23  Commoner writes of Earth Day’s success: “The environment has just been rediscovered by those who live in it. In the United States the event was celebrated in April 1970, during Earth Week. It was a sudden, noisy awakening. School children cleaned up rubbish; college students organized huge demonstrations; determined citizens recaptured the streets from the automobile, at least for a day. Everyone seemed to be aroused to the environmental danger and eager to do something about it” (1).    

  19  

Clean Air Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970,

Commoner insists that a totalized understanding of pervasive crisis has not been

achieved. As he writes: “Despite the constant reference to palpable, everyday life

experiences—foul air, polluted water, and rubbish heaps—there is an air of unreality

about the environmental crisis” (293). Like Silent Spring, Commoner’s work is an

attempt to diagnose this “air of unreality,” this time for an audience more attuned to the

pervasiveness of ecological damage. Commoner suggests that it is the difficulty of

thinking the totality of environmental relations that makes ecological crisis so difficult

to grasp.

Commoner’s phrase “air of unreality” is quite apt for understanding this

argument, for one of his most sustained analyses concerns the problem of air pollution

as a measure of the recalcitrance of ecological crisis. In a chapter called “Los Angeles

Air,” Commoner delineates the reasons why air pollution in major cities—L.A. being the

central example—resists easy comprehension. “Because complexity and variability are

inseparable from air pollution, the problem is one that resists piecemeal analysis and

eludes detailed description,” Commoner claims (77). Like the pesticides that Carson

describes, the complexity of variables involved make it difficult to understand the

composition of air pollution. As Commoner points out:

many … air pollutants interact chemically, and their reactions are influenced by temperature, humidity, and light intensity. This leads to the dismal, but I believe realistic, conclusion that the detailed composition of air is not merely unknown, but also unknowable to a considerable degree. (76)

Evaluating the relation of air pollution to health is even more tricky: “the search for a

simple cause-and-effect relationship between a given air pollutant and a specific disease

breaks down in a hopeless morass of complex interactions” (77). Nonetheless,

Commoner stresses, it is clear that the urban air of the 1960s and 70s—brimming with

  20  

“sulfur dioxide,” “dust originating in furnace ash, industrial operations, and the wearing

down of motor tires and asphalt paving by traffic,” “asbestos particles,” “mercury vapor

from industrial operations,” and “a variety of organic compounds released into the air by

combustion and chemical industrial processes”—is a toxic and noxious brew that

contributes to a variety of illnesses and other forms of environmental degradation (75-

76).

The air becomes a central trope for Commoner as he describes ecological

problems that are at once daily and systemic, pervasive and recalcitrant, affecting

humans and nonhumans in ways that are difficult to predict or comprehend. The “rising

miasma” of toxins in the air, he claims, reveals the extent to which “we must expect the

unexpected in environmental pollution” (47, 227). Commoner offers several

explanations for this sense of the unexpected. First and foremost, it is difficult to

internalize that the air—usually considered “freely and continuously available from

nature,” along with soil, water, and other naturally occurring phenomena—is in fact

being altered by human activity (273). To consider the air as a sphere not separate from

human concern but in fact susceptible to anthropogenic degradation is a difficult

cognitive shift, particularly when palpable signs of these effects are not always easy to

locate. Harder still to internalize is the fact that various forms of pollution are

necessary, logical effects of the runaway success of modern industrial and technological

advances in postwar America. Commoner argues in a key passage:

The modern high-compression gasoline engine contributes to smog and nitrate pollution because it successfully meets its design criterion—the development of a high level of power. Modern synthetic insecticides kill birds, fish, and useful insects just because they are successfully absorbed by insects and kill them, as they were intended to do. (185)

  21  

By pointing to the unholy alliance between the successful designs of industrial and

commodity goods and their deleterious environmental impacts, Commoner reveals a

profound disconnect between the streamlined ease and comforts of modern consumer

life and the discomfiting environmental realities that accompany them. As he writes,

“Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our

most celebrated technological achievements—the automobile, the jet plane, the power

plant, industry in general, and indeed, the modern city itself—are, in the environment,

failures” (80).

Commoner claims, further, that this aporia between technological and consumer

success and environmental failure illuminates a fundamental inability to consider what

he calls the “social, global nature” of ecological interconnection (298). Commoner’s term

for this global connectivity is the ecosphere, which suggests a more totalizing and all-

encompassing structure than ecosystem or environment. This term stresses both the

interconnection between human and nonhuman phenomena and the global reach of

human relations: “Like the ecosphere itself, the peoples of the world are linked through

their separate but interconnected needs to a common fate” (292). To grasp the

complexity of these ties, Commoner argues, we must think beyond the bounds of the

individual and even the national. He highlights a variety of scales of anthropogenic

phenomena, claiming that the ecological impacts of all of these dimensions of human

activity must be considered in order to understand the complex workings of the

ecosphere: “the number of people supported by the earth’s natural system; the sciences

that tell us what we know about nature; the technology that converts this knowledge to

practical action; the resultant industrial and agricultural production that extracts new

wealth from the earth’s skin; the economic systems that govern the distribution and

  22  

uses of wealth; the social, cultural, and political processes that shape all the rest” (113).

It is profoundly difficult, Commoner claims, to comprehend how all these relations work

at a systemic and global scale. The tendency, instead, is to consider the environment as

separate from the social and economic realm, and to investigate “one set of

relationships” in isolation while ignoring the holistic network in which these relations

are embedded (23).24

In all these senses, the concept of the ecosphere and the ecological crisis that

reveal its varied forms of interrelation remain resistant to the paradigm of

environmental consciousness, which favors one-on-one encounter and a sense of

increasing appreciation for one’s surroundings. Instead, Commoner points to the degree

to which most meaningful environmental activity occurs in the productive sphere, at the

level of the social aggregate, and in the “synergistic reactions and interactions” between

ecological phenomena—all levels not assimilable to immediate, first-hand experience of

a local site. Further, Commoner suggests a basic paradox in human relations to the

environment. “Biologically, human beings participate in the environmental system as

subsidiary parts of the whole. Yet, human society is designed to exploit the environment

as a whole, to produce wealth. The paradoxical role we play in the natural

environment—at once participant and exploiter—distorts our perception of it” (11).

Given these fundamental disjunctions between our biological participation in and our

                                                                                                               24  Commoner is using this point in part to diverge from Paul Ehrlich’s popular claim that population growth was the central environmental problem of the age. “Pollution begins not in the family bedroom but in the corporate boardroom,” Commoner famously asserted at an Earth Day teach-in at Brown University. Quoted in Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism website, “Barry Commoner” obituary, October 1, 2012. http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/10/01/barry-commoner-1917-2012/. Accessed January 15, 2015.  

  23  

social exploitation of the environment, it is no wonder, according to Commoner, that

our comprehension of crisis remains “crude and uncertain” (19).

Yet Commoner’s book does not merely diagnose how this “air of unreality”

makes environmental crisis-thinking so difficult. It also explores, through its central

image of the “closing circle,” what Williams calls the “undeniable experience of the

present”—the lived sense of environmental crisis as an ongoing and intensifying

phenomenon (128). This inversion of the Earth’s spherical capaciousness to evoke a

more bounded and precarious unity invokes a palpable sense of encroaching limits. It

also resignifies the well-known image of “spaceship Earth”—popularized by Adlai

Stevenson, Barbara Ward, and Buckminster Fuller, but used most extensively by Paul

Ehrlich in The Population Bomb to represent the planet’s limited carrying capacity and

resources, as well as the shared destiny of the Earth’s occupants—to speak more

viscerally to ecological diminishment and scarcity. If it is impossible to fully grasp the

complex interconnections that compose the ecosphere, there does exist a sense of

collective vulnerability and looming limits, of global interconnection glimpsed through

the lens of impending disaster, that the image of the circle closing evokes. It is this

anxious sensation of atmospheric enclosure that Ashbery’s poems of this era conjure

with such intensity. As Ashbery writes in Three Poems of “something new” in the air:

“Outside, can’t you hear it, the traffic, the trees, everything getting nearer. To end up

with, inside each other” (248). It is to Ashbery’s exploration of increasingly

claustrophobic connection amidst an inchoate but palpable threat, transmitted by the

air, that this chapter now turns.

Ashbery’s Atmospheres

  24  

What is the air? As Ashbery puts it in “Clepsydra,” it is, first and foremost, “non-

absence.” Atmosphere figures in Ashbery’s work of the sixties and seventies as a

material presence which is “indispensable” and yet “dimensionless”: it is “the unseen

mesh that draws around everything” (285-86). Atmosphere emerges as a mysterious

force, ever-present, all-embracing, yet unavailable to full comprehension: “for we never

knew, never knew, what joined us together,” he writes in Three Poems. Air figures in

these works as backdrop, the invisible condition in which we move and breathe: “How

we move around in our little ventilated situation, how roomy it seems!” (305). It spreads

out invisibly, containing all and yet retaining its distinctiveness: “the trees and the

streets are there merely to divide it up,” Ashbery writes (280). Though the air encircles

and absorbs, it exceeds the human and remains irreducible to our imaginative practices,

modes of knowing, and even sensory perception. It is, as he puts it in “Clepsydra,” “what

surrounds without insisting” (142). Atmosphere in Ashbery’s work of this era, first and

foremost, is a figure for the externality of forces beyond the human that cannot be

immediately assimilated to comprehension. “There is that sound like the wind /

Forgetting in the branches that means something / Nobody can translate,” he writes in

a poem “Summer,” from The Double Dream of Spring (186).

At the same time, the air is the primary means by which we interact with our

surroundings, and Ashbery evokes this intimate relation of breathing often in this work.

Yet this relation is not one which permits knowledge; instead, it works invisibly on and

with us. “To be your breath as it is taken in and shoved out…. The cold, external factors

are inside us at last, growing in us for our improvement, asking nothing, not even a

commemorative thought,” Ashbery writes in Three Poems (248). The air is emptiness but

also necessity; it is what we depend on for survival that “asks nothing” in return. Thus

  25  

in Three Poems he describes a “we” who is “scrutinizing the air only to ask, ‘Is it giving?’

but not so dependent on the answer as not to have our hopes and dreams, our very

personal idea of how to live and go on living” (255). Human relation to the air, Ashbery

claims, primarily consists of momentary acknowledgment only to turn back to our own

realm of desires and activities with a renewed, if misguided, sense of independence. Such

atmospheres emphasize not the agential capacities of the conscious mind as they emerge

in an aestheticized encounter with external reality but less willed, more distracted and

forgetful dimensions that echo Carson’s enchanted portraits.

Through these evocations of the air, we glimpse a conception of ecological

relation that is not premised on the “encounter” model of environmental contact—that

Emersonian sense of a direct “conversation with nature” on which so much green

criticism depends.25 Instead, Ashbery’s portrayals of atmosphere point toward a sense of

ecological dependence from which we seem to learn nothing. Thus air, in its absorptive

and yet invisible presence, is representative of a more general overlooking of our

ecological surroundings. In “For John Clare,” he writes:

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope—letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside—costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay. (198)

Our surroundings, Ashbery claims, remain unable to be seen on their own terms, as we

cannot communicate with them directly or comprehend their workings. What can be

done with them, then, in terms of a direct interaction that favors human terms, is

precisely “nothing.” Ashbery importantly refuses any Romantic sense of reciprocity

                                                                                                               25  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987) 222.

  26  

between observer and natural world here, instead illustrating how human systems of

relation and meaning fail to intersect with the nonhuman realm. In fact, Ashbery

parodies any notion of the natural world’s sympathetic attention, as these lines from

Three Poems attest: “I know too that my solipsistic approach is totally wrongheaded and

foolish, that the universe isn’t listening to me any more than the sea can be heard inside

conch shells” (309). Here and elsewhere in these works, Ashbery playfully deflates any

grandiose claim of mutuality.

To read Ashbery’s poems of this era with attention to their atmospheres, then, is

to unsettle a commonplace of Ashbery criticism that emphasizes a fundamental

reciprocity between consciousness and the natural world. Reading Ashbery as a

“landscape poet”—Andrew Ross claims, for example, that “Ashbery is nothing if not a

landscape poet”—various critics have argued that a central dimension of Ashbery’s

work is a ceaseless merging of interior and exterior scenes, where the mind becomes a

landscape and landscape moves in and with the mind.26 Angus Fletcher describes

Ashbery “perambulat[ing] through the landscape of his own thoughts”; Bonnie Costello

argues that “consciousness of landscape has become, for him, indistinguishable from

consciousness as landscape” (135-36; 174).27 Moving beyond a paradigm of

indeterminacy and linguistic play that was determinative of Ashbery criticism of the

past generation, this critical emphasis on landscape points instead to a real referent in

Ashbery’s poetry while foregrounding the aesthetic dimensions of perspective and

relation between mind and world. For Costello, Fletcher, and Ben Hickman, this fluidly

                                                                                                               26  Andrew Ross, “Taking the Tennis Court Oath,” in The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Susan M. Schultz (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995) 197. 27   Fletcher 135-36; Bonnie Costello, “John Ashbery: Landscapeople,” in Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003) 174. See also Srikanth Reddy’s chapter on Ashbery and rivers in his Changing Subjects: Digression in Modern American Poetry.

  27  

unfolding and immersive interplay between inner and outer scenes can be understood as

an inheritance that Ashbery gleans from John Clare. As Hickman writes, “Ashbery

conceives of an immersion in thought itself, in correspondence to the way that Clare

finds immediacy in his natural surroundings.”28 Yet what a poem like “For John Clare”

reveals is precisely how Ashbery’s attention to the local and immanent—a lesson

learned from Clare—leads him to notice how we fail to notice or integrate our

surroundings into consciousness. Such poems resist a harmonious mirroring of internal

and external realms and instead meditate on the natural world’s opacity and the

fundamental disjunction between everyday ecological being and environmental

knowledge.

To make such a claim is, in part, to propose that Ashbery’s poems of this period

might be addressing their ecological present in ways that move beyond depoliticized

immanence. Here I follow Stephen Paul Miller’s assertion that “John Ashbery is one of

our most political poets. His customary evasions of logical and thematic closure allow

his poetry to register cultural nuances and patterns that poetries of more overt

narrative or thematic content might overlook” (148). Critics such as Miller and, more

recently, Chris Nealon and Jasper Bernes, have emphasized Ashbery’s responsiveness to

economic and cultural issues of the late sixties and early seventies, offering compelling

readings of the ways Ashbery’s forms of indirection often convey complex accounts of

the material processes of social change. Yet readings of Ashbery as “landscape poet” are

curiously devoid of any analogous mention of contemporaneous environmental

questions, as if Ashbery’s landscapes exist in a continuous present beyond historical

                                                                                                               28  Ben Hickman, John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012) 77.

  28  

bounds.29 Given the intense concern for environmental issues during this period, it

seems unlikely indeed that Ashbery’s portrayals of nonhuman surroundings would fail

to register any such sense of disturbance. To approach the air’s distinctive presence in

Ashbery’s work of this era, then, is to demur from readings of the environment in

Ashbery as simply synonymous with human consciousness and instead to read his

atmospheres as bearing signs, however inchoate, of historical change. As I have been

arguing here, the air is expressive of the ways we are involved with external, nonhuman

forces that often remain inaccessible to conscious attention. At the same time, Ashbery’s

atmospheres in Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, and Three Poems do

not simply evoke ecological externality as an unchanging given. They point, with

increasing urgency, to the difference of the present as borne in and by the air.

If these poems offer no model of environmental awakening or education, they do

trace other forms of ecological sensing. Ashbery’s air increasingly appears, in the poems

of this era, as a slight disturbance at the periphery of awareness. He calls this, in “For

John Clare,” “the feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind” (198).

Here, Ashbery stages a shift from invisibility—the air as what is taken for granted—to

something sensed, however indirectly or recessively. Importantly, this is a feeling that

evokes not only a private but a shared sense of half-recognition, an intuition about an

unnamed other’s partial awareness. Such indirect noticing, in these poems, often

modulates into a registering of the air’s presence as an aura of disquiet and change.

“Hasn’t the sky?” “Clepsydra” begins, an unanswered question that marks, above all, a

                                                                                                               29  One notable exception is Christopher Schmidt’s queer ecological reading of Ashbery. See “The Queer Nature of Waste in John Ashbery’s The Vermont Notebook” in The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 57-90.  

  29  

sense of the distinction of the present—some sense that the sky has done something, has

acted or changed in some definitive, yet unlocatable way (140). Hasn’t the sky—what?

In this sense, Ashbery’s calling attention to air becomes a means not only of

meditating on an ever-present surround—an ecological externality we can “do nothing

with”—but of marking its changing dimensions. And indeed, one of the most important

features of Ashbery’s work of this era, particularly in Three Poems, is an insistent

attention to a changing present whose features remain “in solution,” its workings

unclear. Ashbery’s interest, here, is in describing the strange texture of the present

before it folds into retrospective clarity—what he calls a “surface on which a new phrase

may be written before it rejoins history” (315). Ashbery thematizes the impossible

attempt to grasp its contours again and again in Three Poems, pointing to the

unfathomably “vast activities” that the present reveals upon attentive examination:

What is it for you then, the insistent now that baffles and surrounds you in its loose-knit embrace that always seems to be falling away and yet remains behind, stubbornly drawing you, the unwilling spectator who had thought to stop only just for a moment, into the sphere of its solemn and suddenly utterly vast activities, on a new scale as it were, that you have neither the time nor the wish to unravel? (323-24)

What emerges is a newfound sense of the “vast activities” of the present—a “new scale”

that evades comprehension while nonetheless “drawing…the unwilling spectator” in.

The feeling, carried in and through the air, is a palpable sense of unease: “You can feel it

in every pore, in the sudden hush that falls over the din of the busy street and the

unusual darkness in the sky even though no clouds are apparent” (308).

Such intermittent, uneasy apprehensions of change—“something is

happening”—develops in these works by way of figures in postures of listening and

waiting, attempting to read what Ashbery calls “the advancing signs of the air.” In Three

Poems, Ashbery writes: “At this time of life whatever being there is is doing a lot of

  30  

listening, as though to the feeling of the wind before it starts, and it slides down this

anticipation of itself, already full-fledged, a lightning existence that has come into our

own” (280). What signals are borne in the air, the wind, and what do they portend? The

“lightning existence” that Ashbery describes here refuses assimilation and yet can be

anticipated, listened for. “But the thinness behind, the vague air: this captivates every

spectator. All eyes are riveted to its slowly unfolding expansiveness” (252). Such images

of the shared reading of atmospheric signs imply that the air bears more—something

greater and suprasensible—than simply a seasonal shift or impending storm while

resisting any explanatory narrative. And in turn, these repeated descriptions that turn

attention to the air, delineating its undefinable nature and anticipating an as-yet-

unknowable change, produce a collective form of ecological perception along the lines of

Williams’s descriptions of emergent “social experience” that has not congealed into full

legibility but nonetheless “exert[s] palpable pressures” (131). In Ashbery’s work of this

era, we cannot know the air, but we can sense it—and what we sense is not immanence but

imminence.

“It Became Impossible to Breathe”

Three Poems most extensively diagnoses this sense of a “new arrangement” emerging in

and through systemic crisis (303). Here, the present is not simply different because all

presents are different from what preceded them; this work charts how a present feels

when, as Ashbery writes, “the system was breaking down” (281). As Nealon has argued

in The Matter of Capital, Ashbery’s poetry of this era is perhaps his most insistently

political, undertaking a sustained exploration of the signals and forms of socioeconomic

crisis. Nealon claims that Ashbery examines the era’s tumultous shift from industrial to

  31  

finance capital as it occurred in New York City in particular, often by way of “figures of

looming disaster that the poet believes he can simply choose to ‘wander away’ from.”30

And indeed, the opening lines of “The System” (the second of the three poems)

dramatize this sense of impending breakdown: “The one who had wandered alone past

so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along the primal vein that led

to his center, the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center

to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one’s way to where the

country is” (281). This “beginning of a hiccup” that will eventually lead to some greater

social convulsion, enfolding disparate regions into shared catastrophe, registers a sense

of impending crisis as somatic disturbance that travels outward.

In Nealon’s reading, Ashbery’s solitary “wandering” speaker is significantly

separate from this looming catastrophe, able to slip away from its grasp. Nealon argues:

“Again and again in his poems from this period, the poet describes scenes of spectacle,

pageantry, and even apocalypse, which are made harmless by the poet’s turning to face

the other way, or drifting in a different direction….”(78). This ability to turn from

disaster does not reflect a stance of superiority or privilege so much as an instinctive

response to endangerment. Yet while Nealon emphasizes Ashbery’s attempts to

differentiate himself from figures of concentrated power and spectacles of financial

accumulation, to “counterpose” the “phenomenology of dailiness, its flux, its shifts in

mood” against “the frightening public world of punctual event, of ‘news,’” I point to the

ways Ashbery’s records of the everyday intimate an impending crisis that cannot be

escaped (91). Rather than a spectacle that can be turned away from, Ashbery’s

                                                                                                               30  Chris Nealon, “John Ashbery’s Optional Apocalypse,” in The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011), 78.

  32  

atmospheres evoke an ambient space of non-privacy and shared susceptibility to an

unlocatable danger.

To make this claim is to argue that there is more than one crisis—and crisis-

consciousness—that Ashbery charts in his work of this era. Crisis-thinking in these

poems reflects various responses to a recognition of one’s essential determination by

external forces. “For no choice is possible,” Ashbery avers in Three Poems (300). If

Ashbery’s response to economic determination is willful disengagement and retreat, his

response to ecological determination, by constrast, is anxiety and bewilderment. Thus

while the specter of economic crisis serves as a means by which Ashbery can assert a

“posture of minority,” examining the contrast between the “labor of writing” and

capitalism’s structural violence, his ecological evocations point to a more totalized crisis,

expressed in a collective register: “everything and everybody were included after all”

(278). In such descriptions, the speaker is inseparable from the “system” and cannot

wander away, however temporarily.

Such ecological determination begins to feel, particularly in Three Poems, like

Commoner’s closing circle: “It became impossible to breathe in this constricted

atmosphere,” Ashbery writes (287). In Three Poems, this sense of a “constricted

atmosphere” is most fully materialized. Particularly in “The System” and “The Recital”

(the second and third poems of the book), figures of environmental disturbance abound.

“The landscape isn’t making sense anymore,” Ashbery asserts (322). New threats such

as toxins and weird throngs appear: “All the pine trees seemed to be dying of a

mysterious blight. There was no one to care. The sky was still that nauseatingly cloying

shade of blue, with the thin ribbon of cirrus about to disappear and materialize over

other, alien lands, far from here” (322). Alongside Ashbery’s portrayals of the pageantry

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of economic circulation in breakdown mode, here we see an image of a global circulation

of air itself, ominously disappearing and rematerializing. In images such as these,

atmosphere morphs from benign external presence into something closer to antagonist.

“But meanwhile it seems as if our little space were moving counter to us, dragging us

backward,” Ashbery writes (305). At the same time, Ashbery evokes the air as suddenly,

terrifyingly full of humans. He writes of this moving swarm:

At this time of year the populations emerge again into the arena of life after the death of winter, and one is newly conscious of the multitudes that swarm past one in the streets; there is something of death here too in the way they plunge past toward some unknown destination.... (275)

The air becomes literally full: teeming with other bodies and with unseen toxins,

circulating mysteriously, involving everyone. Humans populate the air, changing its

proportions without mingling harmoniously with it. This mysterious relation is framed

as excess and imbalance, tinged with ominous foreboding.

In these images, then, air comes to stand not for freedom, spaciousness, or even

simply the medium of experience. Instead, it figures a decidedly claustrophobic sense of

what Ashbery calls “imprisonment” by independent forces that are neither chosen nor

controllable, nor even fully comprehensible (289). In these lines, Ashbery invokes some

of the environmental rhetoric of the era around overpopulation concerns, yet without

making any extended case on the issue. Blight, overpopulation, incremental poison: all

these dimensions of ecological degradation make appearances, but not as the direct

subject of concern. And in turn, Three Poems registers how this constriction produces

circulating, intensifying anxiety, what Ashbery calls “this uneasiness that is

undermining our health, causing us to think crazy thoughts and behave erratically. We

can no longer live our lives properly” (321).

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To attend to the air, for Ashbery, is thus to glimpse an all-inclusive surround

that holds everything, yet remains both unknowable and subject to change. By

substantializing the air, these poems also materialize this ecological determination that

often remains invisible:

Thus summed up, he felt sickened at the wholeness. Better it should evaporate into the almost palpable clouds of the night than sit around as a reproach for all that was never going to be, now, since it included everything. Begone! But the solid block just sat there. Little by little its mass began to grow transparent, like clouds just before dawn. (276)

This “solid block” is impervious to human desires, following its own logic, yet

“include[ing] everything.” Such an image of atmospheric externality makes visible,

however fleetingly, a sense of the “whole,” the ecosphere in which all beings and

phenomena are included. It is, for Ashbery, a “sicken[ing]” glimpse of ecological

interconnection. What “sicken[s]” here is, in part, a recognition that, as he writes

elsewhere, “we are connected, though far apart”; such queasiness also stems from the

fact that this “mass” belies familiarity. We remain wholly dependent on a “whole” that

resists our comprehension almost entirely. Indeed, as Ashbery insists in a passage that

echoes Commoner’s claims, “that knowledge of the whole is impossible or at least so

impractical as to be rarely or never feasible” (290). While Commoner points to the

fundamental disjunction between human participation in nature and exploitation of its

resources (or, for Carson, manipulation of its processes), Ashbery betrays no interest in

unveiling the material relations that underlie these affective responses in any specificity.

But Ashbery’s portrayals of atmospheric sensing that does not add up to knowing are no

less historically-minded. Instead they insist that an accurate sense of the present can

only be approached by way of indirection and dream-like divigation. And in turn, his

work claims for poetry a particularly keen ability to dwell in such states.

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“Certain Illegible Traces”

The beginning of Three Poems asks, “Have I awakened? Or is this sleep again? Another

form of sleep?” (247). Andrew Dubois characterizes this dimension of Ashbery’s work

astutely: “There is a quality, by its nature hard to name, that one associates with a

certain mode of Ashbery: diffusion, some gauzy feeling, as if moving through spun

sugar, then actual cobwebs; obscurity, but more like opacity with an occasional

glistening. This quality is like the feeling of being in a dream.”31 In place of a Romantic

bildungsroman narrative (such as Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which serves as a key foil

for Three Poems in particular), the journey of Three Poems delves deeper into these

uncertain states of consciousness, these persistent questions, wherever they lead.32 “We

must drink the confusion, sample that other, concerted, dark effort that pushes not to

the light, but toward a draft of dank, clammy air,” the poem continues (247). Rather

than illuminating the process by which a subject emerges into clarity and self-awareness

(or parodying this process), Three Poems dwells in the vicissitudes of what Ashbery calls

                                                                                                               31  Andrew Dubois, Ashbery’s Forms of Attention (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006) 58. Dubois astutely claims that that “Three Poems is an attempt to reach another form of dream, something very like a dream in being an alternative mental state beyond conscious rationality” (65). For Dubois, this state toward which the poem reaches is “mystical transcendence.” In my reading, this state is less privately and spiritually rooted, and is instead an exploration of collective sensibilities and moods that have not yet cohered (in Williams’s phrasing, “practical consciousness” as opposed to “official consciousness”) (130). 32  On the relationship between Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Ashbery’s poetry, see Ben Hickman, John Ashbery and English Poetry. Hickman focuses particular attention on the relation between A Wave and The Prelude.  

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“the forms of your inattention and incapacity or unwillingness to understand,” and

dilates these forms of imperfect comprehension (299).33

Yet Ashbery insists that this dreambound state is not a misapprehension or

distortion but instead the only feasible means of perceiving one’s conditions. Ashbery

often dramatizes this perception by way of images of half-hearing or waiting for a sign

that never emerges into full clarity. As he writes in Three Poems:

The unsatisfactoriness, the frowns and squinting, the itching and scratching as you listen without taking in what is being said to you, or only in part, so that you cannot piece the argument together, should not be dismissed as signs of our chronic all-too-human weakness but welcomed and examined as signs of life in which part of the whole truth lies buried. (299)

Ashbery insists here that such inability to put the pieces together, to see clearly, is no

failure but instead the only appropriate response to the complexity of the present, in

which “part of the whole truth lies buried.” There no attempt at demystification here,

but instead an acceptance of uncertainty as inevitable. In turn, these images of non-

comprehension and bewilderment bespeak a different sense of poetic communication,

akin to the non-reflective relation between mind and nature that these poems stage,

where something may be transmitted from text to reader (or from atmosphere to

subject), but not by way of direct correspondence or harmonious comprehension.

                                                                                                               33  Here I gesture toward Harold Bloom’s well-known reading of Three Poems that argues the poem is “addressed by I, John Ashbery writing to You, Ashbery as he is in the process of becoming,” in John Ashbery: The Charity of the Hard Moments” Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 200-203. Marjorie Perloff, instead, sees “the constant interrupting or undercutting of ‘beautiful and simple designs’ by parody, pastiche, and the lampooning of the self, whether that self is designated as ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘we,’ or ‘he’” (281). For Perloff, “polyphony … replaces the pattern of crisis and resolution to which we are accustomed in nineteenth century writing” (280). See “Barthes, Ashbery, and the Zero Degree of Genre,” in Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1990). As my reading here suggests, neither of these versions adequately accounts for the questions of the social and ecological textures of the present that Ashbery investigates in his work of this era.

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In so doing, Ashbery’s writing also forwards a larger argument about poetry.

Ashbery’s ecological turn obsessively stages a sense of partial knowing, its untimeliness,

by meditating on what cannot be fully known or understood about a given present.

Poetry’s particular work, Ashbery suggests, is to bear this uncertainty forward in and

through its form: what he calls the “certain illegible traces” that remain “like chalk dust

on a blackboard after it has been erased” that “we must learn to recognize … as the

form—the only one—in which such fragments of the true learning as we are destined to

receive will be vouchsafed to us, if at all” (299). Such lines offer a brief ars poetica, an

account of how poetry contains and transmits knowledge. What we see here is an ethos

of transience rather than durability, defining poetry not as a method of comprehensible

expression so much as a palimpsestic record whose marks must be scrutinized without

the possibility of final understanding. “True learning,” here, is fugitive and proceeds not

by any straightforward educational method but by reading “illegible traces.” As Ashbery

says in some of his most well-known anti-epiphanic lines, from “Soonest Mended,” “the

promise of learning / Is a delusion” (185). In this sense as well, poetry can bear no

prescriptive impulse and no ethical imperative. Its transient logics—a ceaseless “making

ready to forget”—resist not only political agendas or consciousness-raising toward

concrete ends, but more general epistemological aims (186). Indeed, Ashbery’s skeptical

engagement with the themes and arguments of Romantic poetry in his sixties and

seventies poetry involves a refutation of the Wordsworthian sense that a poem should

have a “worthy purpose.”34

In part, this resistance points to the different status of poetry in its present, a

recognition of its definitively marginal status as a cultural form. It is poetry’s very

                                                                                                               34  William Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800 ed., In Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: Norton, 2014) 79.

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untimeliness—its non-assimilability to the dominant logics of its present, its dreamy

refusals and premonitory sensings—that paradoxically attune it to “the secret of what

goes on.” As Vernon Shetley notes in a reading of the first lines of “Soonest Mended”—

“Barely tolerated, living / on the margin / In our technological society”—that “surely

one of the [‘we’s] is we poets, or we who care about poetry,” who now occupy a

distinctly peripheral position.35 Shetley’s point dovetails nicely with Nealon’s reading of

Ashbery’s “posture of minority,” which refers not only to the speaker’s stance but to the

work’s reflection of—and on—the larger cultural position of poetry. Rather than

speaking to and for the cultural logics of his present, Ashbery asks his reader to attend

to the medium—the air, the page—for the “illegible traces” they bear. The poem gathers

up this “debris of living” which “as such cannot be transmitted / Into another, usable

substance” and presents it in and as its traces (249).

I close by turning briefly, to Anahid Nersessian’s recent critique, in her

illuminating essay on “calamity form,” of a tendency in ecocriticism toward

retrospective projections of contemporary responses to environmental crisis onto the

past.36 She writes: “As we become the kinds of people who know intimately the sensuous

suprasensible ruination of our climate, those of us who study the past project this

category of experience onto the people we find there” (307). Nersessian advocates,

instead, a “non-symptomatic, non-anticipatory” reading practice for understanding the

particular calamity-thinking in the workings of a given text. This chapter has revealed a

sympathetic resonance with the localizing, disorienting formalism that Nersessian calls

for, with its imperative to preserve the open-endedness, the unsettled quality of

                                                                                                               35  Vernon Shetley, “John Ashbery’s Difficulty,” in After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary American Poetry (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 165. 36  Anahid Nersessian, “Two Gardens: An Experiment in Calamity Form,” in Modern Language Quarterly 74:3 (September 2013) 307-329.

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ecological thinking in a given poem. Yet what this reading of Ashbery finally highlights

is his work’s portrayal of sensing without knowing: to, in fact, its anticipatory logics.

In the case of Ashbery’s seventies works, the opening of Nersessian’s quote is

actually quite apt: “As we become the kinds of people who know intimately the sensuous

suprasensible ruination of our climate”—for Ashbery’s work is precisely attuned to this

intimate “becoming,” a becoming that is, in Williams’s sense, still “in solution,” not yet

fully achieved. A contemporary encounter with these poems produces, then, a certain

chiasmus, wherein the poem looks forward, meditating on a problem or presence that, as

Ashbery writes, “no one recognizes … and it does not even recognize itself yet, or know

what it is,” while his present-day reader must look back into the “illegible traces,”

reading not toward final legibility or salvational kernel, nor for a straightforward

prehistory of the present, but to sustain their anticipatory partiality. There is, perhaps,

no meeting in the middle, no destination securely reached, only this ceaseless traversal.

Indeed, Ashbery’s anticipatory atmospheres do not return us to our own present, to

what he calls, in a 2013 poem, “the cloud of knowing” under which we dwell in a time of

generalized climate crisis, but they perhaps attune us to the historical sense—and

sensings—of air.37

                                                                                                               37  John Ashbery, “The Cloud of Knowing,” The White Review Issue 8 (October 2013): http://www.thewhitereview.org/poetry/the-cloud-of-knowing/

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