[New-Poetry] Poems by Others: Robinson Jeffers

[Anny Ballardini]

I was thinking more or less on the same line. The fact that man was able, thanks to his _cunning_ (might be the right word) to win the tiger, means, in Darwin's terms, that he is the fittest. And sure, Jeffers consumed as much as he needed to live his life.

  From: JforJames at aol.com 

  Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 12:26 AM



  In a message dated 1/5/2007 3:18:40 PM Eastern Standard Time, queenmouse at gmail.com writes:
    The ocean is simply itself.  The rat, the hawk, the cobra are simply what they are, and their beauty and vitality belongs completely to themselves-- what they are *to us* is just not important.  

    I think he would also add that they are   worthier than we are because they have done less harm, and that we should take ourselves and our concepts of beauty and perfection on a long walk off a short pier. After all where have our desires and tastes taken this planet?  How do we reconcile our longing for beauty as we look at the ocean with the fact that the Pacific has a big raft of plastic garbage floating around in it because of our consumer-driven ( i.e., desire-driven) wastefulness?

    Of course this is all just hair splitting.  I just love Jeffers.

  Suzanne, I'll say again I'm also a Jeffers fan. The issue here is veering
  more to the philosophical: What does it mean to say, as Jeffers seems
  to say, that something has 'beauty' without us (humankind). It's pretty
  much our concept; only we can own it. Similarly, what does it mean to 
  say a rock or hawk or twisted pine hasn't harmed its environment? 
  The rock is inanimate. And any living organism, as Darwin has it, would
  by nature choke off the existence of any other living organism in order
  the preserve its own survival. If two plants get along it's only because
  one couldn't get the upper tendril, so to speak. We fantasize harmonious
  relations between living things that coexist only because they haven't 
  been killed of or overcome by another species or they have found some
  mutual benefit in cohabiition with another species. The great circle of
  life is a winner-take-all-death-match played by degrees and influenced
  by vagaries of climate. I'm starting to feel as dour as Thomas Hobbes.

  There there is the naive aspect of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Jeffers. 
  Jeffers lived during the period of the two World Wars and certainly despaired 
  of humankind's action. (There are a number of his poems that
  seem to show Jeffers believed poetry had a social function; otherwise
  I don't think he would written them). He saw enough development and
  environmental change around Carmel CA where he built (by hand) the 
  Tor House to see that humankind could readily ruin a beautiful landscape,
  but I don't think that he adequately recognized his own complicity. He
  gets to California early on and builds himself a house by sea because it's
  wonderful to have a house by the sea. It should have occured to Jeffers
  that others would have the same desire as he and in time all coastal areas
  unprotected from devlepment would either be developed or become off-limits 
  to due ownership of already established landowners. So there is something 
  a little thin in his argument for nature's purity and man's venal exploitation.

  Still, you've got to like a guy who said he didn't believe poetry had
  a civilizing effect, that poetry appealed to what was most primitive
  in man. Diderot has that great line "that poetry must have something
  in that is barbaric, vast and wild." Alex could probably quote it in
  French for us. I love that about Jeffers.


  Finnegan

  http://ursprache.blogspot.com
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