URBAN NATURE
Edited by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Introduction by Emily Hiestand
(Milkweed Press,1999)

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

“The idea ‘city’ is almost as mutable as ‘nature.’ Lewis Mumford, lover of cities, says it has taken us ‘more than five thousand years to arrive at even a partial understanding of the city's nature and drama’: how cities emerge, grow, decay, implode, and renew themselves.”

Ideas about nature are famously malleable.  Try to take just a peek, and Shazamm! — you  have opened what Casey Stengal once called "A box of Pandoras." Nature can mean everything that is, an everything that clearly contains us, along with our jazz riffs, fiber optics, and crème brûlée. Nature can mean the given world, all those aspects of the earth not created by humankind; and what the English Romantic poets meant: a spiritual depth, immanent in the mountains and mists of the Lake District. Nature can mean what the Stoics meant by "physis" — an active, guiding force, more verb than noun, the prolific energies that inform existence.

The idea "city" is almost as mutable as "nature." Lewis Mumford, lover of cities, says it has taken us "more than five thousand years to arrive at even a partial understanding of the city's nature and drama": how cities emerge, grow, decay, implode, and renew themselves. Beyond bricks and mortar, Mumford envisions the city as a container — a supple container that holds the accretions of time, transmitting memories, images, and signals from generation to  generation. More etherealized yet is his correct prediction of the "invisible city," in which many functions of the old urban center have dematerialized, transferred to mobile forms like the cybercommunities. 

Did Italo Calvino glean the title of his poetic masterpiece from Mumford?  Calvino's Invisible Cities spun the heads of a whole generation of urbanologists. Here are a poet's urban plans: a revolving city, sacred to Mercury; a city whose foundation is spiderwebs suspended over an abyss; a city where happiness exists unaware, within unhappiness; a city coursed with strings that mark the intricate bonds of kin and trade; a city in which it is impossible to say who is dead and who is alive: a city built on stilts. (Do the citizens hate the earth, or "respect it so much they avoid all contact," or do they "love it as it was before they existed and….never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence"?)

Calvino's fabulous cities ring true because they illuminate longings and failings that reverberate in each human community. And too, his cities — of threads, of monsters linked to stars, of memories traded at the equinox — seem plausible enough when we recall how many ways cities have been imagined and designed: fortress; simulacrum of heaven; transformer for divine energies; theater, in which the citizenry plays chorus and audience; repository for the collective archetypes of a people — men grappling with sea serpents; a shining suspension bridge, a brawny woman with a torch. 

Dynamic and evolving, cities are shot through with natural  energies — not only with micro-organisms, ginkos, roots, and rivers, but with the engines of human desire. In its original Latin, the primary sense of civitas, which we translate as city, was citizenship — the body of citizens, the community. Only over time has "city" come to mean a place inhabited by a community. This emphasis on the tissue of human connectivity reminds us that the nature at the core of the city is human nature. Send in the rollerbladers, opera singers, and engineers, the flaneurs, the mayor, and chefs, the brokers, the brokenhearted, the hopeful, the frightened, the sure of foot. 

The human city responds to the deepest human desires — for security and safety, for ceremonial and sacred centers, for spontaneity, civility, and encounter, for sociability and surprise, for exchanges of goods, learning, friendship, power, and love. And good coffee.

Over the centuries, the city has often been considered separate from the natural world — once as a stay against nature, more recently as a threat to it. Now, as an anthology entitled Urban Nature illustrates, something new is emerging. As urbanlogists absorb the insights of ecology, and nature's stewards remember that the city is itself a treasure worthy of care, we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the human city — as a place on a continuum with wheat fields and cedar forests, a place with its own authentic nature.

Invoking Henri Lebevre's The Production of Space, critic Gary Roberts proposes that the collaboratively created social space of the urban world (a space that includes motion and time) is itself an environmental feature — a space that belongs in any portrait of nature's metropolis. Meanwhile, ecologists whose beat has long been wilderness tracts and ocean depths, have begun to think about cities as ecosystems, powerful ones, with their own air and water chemistry, with characteristic species mixes, with even their own weather systems. Atlanta, Georgia, for instance, has its very own permanent low-pressure system — an urban "heat island" capable of generating fronts and thunderstorms. A downtown ecologist will study much of what she would in a forest:  hydrological systems, energy transfers, and predator-prey relations. Analogies to the human city are readily found in the insect world — in the complex hierarchies of anthills and terminaries – and in the animal kingdom, full of what Mumford called "foreshadowings," all those gathering places where animals come to breed, to eat, to feel secure. All this said, who fails to notice that the city is not quite like anything else on earth?

The poems here explore many faces of nature's metropolis. They experiment. They resonate with one another. They contradict one another. They are surprisingly funny. They record many gazes and minute particulars: pigeons packed in ice; a man in shorts; verbs lined up like dominoes; unpalatable eels from the Hudson; a calligraphy of lights; a river black as a bassoon. As they roam the urban landscape, many poems register degradations, but from the beginning, Urban Nature signals its intention to render landscapes bled of sentimentality. "I beg you," writes Czeslaw Milosz, "no more of those lamentations." (For this and dozens of other splendid editorial choices, we can thank poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, editor of this collection.) Milosz observes the given world with keen fascination and affection; what he wishes to advise against in "Advice," is the tendency to overstylize nature — as an ideal, pure, Edenic realm, a conception that isn't supple enough to take account of history or physics (or metaphysics for that matter), and can lead to tragic consequences, the neglect of urban policy for one. 

It may be that the poet, or city planner, who emulates the open-ended, resilient, and mutable qualities of nature is best able to generate sounds and shapes, images and patterns that can aid and abet a sustainable culture. This collection, which honors the urban world, brims with such aid. Like Calvino's Kubla Khan, we do not "necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions," but we are "able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing."

Meg Kearney heads directly to the clues in words themselves, shows us a city glowing with "a floor of stalagmite, lit by its own desire / to exist. What was it?" Peter E. Murphy slyly presents nature and human productivity as at odds — "How does anything get / done when you're out  /  there...staring / at stars that clutter the night sky? — and his faux-disdainful voice records the likely outcome of this view. Sanford Fraser and Douglas Goetsch offer a brace of contrasting penetrations: of the subway by waves and whitecaps; of cosmos by the consumer ethos: "The Pleiades / you could probably buy downtown." 

Chase Twichell records a city possessed by sewer gases, smoke, diesel fumes, and emanations. Frank X. Gaspar marvels at the play of randomness, connection, and persistence in his city: "The  government / has lined all the rivers here with cement..../ There has never been a wonder like these." Jeffrey Harrison turns swifts into words, and words into swifts, moving with ease along the permeable border between bird and word, revealing the changeling, permeable conditions at the border between language and world. 

A dream cockroach tells Martin Espada, "I love you," but the poet guesses that the insect (and quite possibly "JC") does not love him. Mark Defoe observes that disinterested brutality predates the roughness of the human city. His poem for a red salamander gone courting in a parking lot has a tonal fusion of brio, empathy, and c'est la vie. Henri Cole gives testimony to the manna of small visitations, a creamy cabbage butterfly come to a perfidious underworld, a poem that speaks to the comfort we take when discontinuities (of time, place, consciousness) are bridged, even briefly.

Robert Cording does a poignant epistemological turn; in his tale of the ad man and the falcon, even the god-borne, wing-borne message may be fodder to be consumed. Debra Kang Dean presents the old Taoist ideal of an apparently effortless action, a way of being that does not, for example, disturb a flock of birds. Like Blake in "London," Derek Walcott makes the invisible visible, reveals the depraved Empire, Fortress USA hushing its ghettos with "a blizzard of heavenly coke," and feeding the habit of a militarized society: "a punctured sky, needled by rockets that keep both Empires high." Lewis Hyde offers a miniature masterpiece epic, deftly, hilariously, movingly painting the improbability of life: how it prospers; how flukes and dime stores are part of it; how feeding on sludge, a creature — may turn golden. 

Of course, we alter the given world. "How can I open the door and not break this order?" wonders Joan Swift, urban naturalist following the  progress of a small spider crafting its orb on — uh-oh — the handle of her car door. It's the question, of course, for us, consummate door openers and re-arrangers of the way things are, who also value order and pattern. It isn't a sentimental question. It would be immensely odd if we did not feel tenderness, and more, enduring love — what E.O. Wilson names biophilia — for the world in which our humanity is rooted.

Surely, that nature would risk such creatures as human beings — for whom opening all manner of doors — is among the most natural acts – confirms what a daring phenomenon nature is. A "venturing," Holderlin called it. This is also Spinoza's view of nature — Natura naturans — an open-ended process neither rule-bound nor chaotic, but creative within evolving forms. Of Spinoza's idea, Ernst Bloch says it "presupposes...a Natura abscondita, a nature pressing for its own revelation. Thus 'nature in its final manifestation' lies within the horizon of the future of those alliances mediated through humanity and nature." To define the sustaining alliances, we can neither turn to the pre-human Earth for a script, nor sanction all possible human activities: the interplay is neither rule-bound, nor chaotic. Natura naturans resembles the creative discipline of the poet and artist as described by Coleridge: "If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata, what idle rivalry!... Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura naturans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the highest sense and the soul” of a human being fully human.

We know when it happens. As when, in "Times Square Water Music," beside a subway stair, Amy Clampitt, native of the Iowa prairie, transplant in New York City, spies some standing water, "smuggled in" by "weeks of sneaking seepage." Someone has put up a cordon of twine across the stairway, a "half-hearted barricade" that makes the poet smile: 

as though anyone
could tie up seepage
into a package...
As though anyone could stop
the intent,
albeit inadvertent,
in time, at an
inferior level,
to make a lake.

As though anyone could cordon off life's fluidity, the "escapee" found in moths and museums, in gutters and desert arroyos, garment districts and longleaf pines — and in these pages.

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Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance