Nature Poetry Rocks! aka Why Nature Poetry Is Lame

Gardens are the last refuge of the bored poet. 


The comparisons are easy - it's natural, but it's manmade; it's organic things organized inorganically; Paradise, the fall from grace, the universe in microcosm. If you need a simile quick, get yourself a garden and a notebook and let the magic happen.


I picked up a "novel in verse" a while back called "History: The Home Movie" which I intend to read one of these days, mostly because of a quote on the back from the author. "Craig Raines once observed that contemporary poetry was restricted to landscape and the weather, while all the interesting things remained the province of prose."


Maybe Raines' book changes all that, I don't know. I haven't gotten further than a few pages in. But I think it's a valid criticism. 


If you pick up the current issue of "Poetry" magazine (which is to contemporary poetry what "Rolling Stone" is to contemporary music, that is to say - ostensibly the premier source for information on the subject but mostly distracted by ephemera), you'll no doubt find a good third of the poems having to do with landscape and the weather.


Now I know that we are natural beings who live in a natural world and the same laws apply to both. I know that nature provides powerful metaphors for our everyday existence and you can't write a poem off just because of its subject matter.


But not many of these "garden poems" pack a punch like this one. And it's a crying shame.

Woodchucks

Maxine Kumin

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.


Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.


The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.


Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.


There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.