One of the most interesting recent reactions to post-Romantic lyrical density in English-language poetry has been the growth of the essay/poem. This mode recovers for poetry the discursive pleasures of the Horatian epistle or the eighteenth-century meditation, the jumps and capers of once-popular works like Cowper’s “The Winter Walk at Noon.” That doesn’t mean that essay/poems like Orchid Tierney’s lovely meditation on lichen and so much else, looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading, have abandoned the principles of high modernism. They can be paratactic, open-ended, and suspicious of subjective excesses. Their vocabularies are broad and delight in the technical. But like their eighteenth-century forebears, they are rambles, not hikes. looking at the Tiny is about the experience of a walk in a nature refuge at the edge of Nebraska City, Nebraska. The first half discusses that walk, while the chapbook as a whole serves as a response to Lew Welch’s poem “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen.” Like Welch, Tierney sings the sheer weirdness of lichen. Unlike Welch, she tries to catch a glimpse of a world beyond ecological depredation without engaging in the pleasures of apocalyptic destruction. That, at least, is no small part of her goal.
The chapbook begins by recording something of an epiphany. Tierney is out on a ramble with a friend who is a skilled and thoughtful naturalist, a woman who points things out so that Tierney can see what she has never noticed:
“look here,” she said.
“look here.”
“and here.”
“and here.”
“here.”
“wow,” I said. “wow.” (7)
The “wow” is her not-quite-unexpected reaction to the lichen which is “the Tiny” of the title. (It stems originally from Welch’s poem.) It is recorded elsewhere in looking at the Tiny as “little wows.” This counts as a lovely nod to the old Gershwin standard “How Long Has This Been Going On?” where the lover discovers for the first time the glory of being kissed (“Little wow, tell me now / How long has this been going on?”). Is there a nicer or subtler invocation of the erotics of sight, of suddenly finding oneself attuned to the world? Tierney makes this point quite clear:
look at the entire world before me. the lichen I had found was rough to my touch, but I marvelled at this wonderful plural thing, this beautiful blotchy multicolour not-animal-not-plant-more-than-human-warehouse, this bioindexical counter of air quality, this tiny organic engine containing two separate identities. lichens are their own empire, their own fantastic kingdoms of small likeness. new worlds at the surface of the self. (27)
That “entire world before” Tierney feels new, unexplored and exhilarating, both an echo and switcheroo on Milton’s “The World was all before them” at the end of Paradise Lost.[1] Tierney isn’t leaving Eden, though. Her ambition is to heal our alienation from the natural world, not to exacerbate it.
For Tierney, looking at means seeing. Both looking at and seeing entail concentrating on the sheer strangeness of lichen. Put flatly, this means that we should not read lichen in terms of anything else. Early on, Tierney claims that lichen are sui generis and therefore should not be compared to other things: “lichens cannot be likened since they’re unlike anything else.” She goes on to say that “indeed lichens are their own culture-making depositories of strange life” (1). To confront lichen, whose very name sounds, in English at least, like an invitation to analogy, is actually to eschew analogy: to confront lichen’s weird particularity, its symbiotic specificity. Hence Tierney’s friend-guide’s insistence on pointing—here and here and here (7). Hence Tierney’s own insistence on the deictic this. (The word this appears thirty-four times in twenty-six pages.)
Is it possible to limit writing to deictics, to write without comparison, let alone to think without it? Can we approach the unknown without recourse to the known? Can we reduce knowledge to rough equivalents of gesture and pointing? In “Poetry and Grammar,” Gertrude Stein suggests that for some, an ideal poetry might consist of nothing but proper names.[2] But that, of course, would be a very barren and ultimately useless art. It would soon reduce literature to unhelpful tautologies or signifying grunts.
I do not think that Tierney thinks that we should go that way.
looking at the Tiny begins as a eulogy of lichen and it ends as something of an elegy for Gary Snyder’s college roommate and fellow Beat, the aforementioned Lew Welch. Among Welch’s final poems before his disappearance (and probable suicide) is the gloriously taut, apocalyptic “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen.” Tierney wants to save Welch from what she sees as his dissolute reputation. She wants us to see Welch as more than the drunken-genius-who-killed-himself (a tired Romantic trope). She reminds us of his attachments and of his capacity for joyous observation. The hinge between these attachments and that capacity is not merely the fact that Welch wrote a great poem about lichen (which he did), but a further concern with reading. This theme is suggested by lichen’s lateral spread, its capacity to cling to surfaces and to create them. Not surprisingly, the poet Tierney sees lichen as a text (with all that word’s suggestions of texture, textile, etc.).
Is there a danger in this chain of analogy?
Probably not. The cognitive scientist and philosopher Alva Noë has suggested that our embodied perception is fiercely entangled with art in the broadest sense.[3] According to Noë, the world as it presents itself to us becomes present in no small part through our culture. What we notice is what we have learned to notice. But we are not limited to the staler habits of our cultural past because art, through its complicated combinatory practices and its urgency, teaches us to notice both newly and differently, by realigning our habits and our definitions. We can only do that, of course, by starting off from those habits and those definitions.
Noë belongs to that peculiarly American school of thought that marries Jamesian Pragmatism to European phenomenology. There’s no indication in this chapbook that Tierney feels any deep sympathy for philosophical argument. But it strikes me that Tierney shares Noë’s respect for the cognitive powers of art, and his view that art is importantly world-disclosive. Although it might seem at first that Tierney is leery of analogy—all those “here”’s and “this”’s—she is also happy to freely indulge in imaginative play. She riffs on “looking over” and “overlooking” and on the homophones of “lichen.” (I began to wonder if lichen might have derived from the same Germanic root as our verb to look, but I was out of luck. It derives from a Greek word meaning to lick. And that promises an even more primitive, more fundamental form of interaction.)
Tierney freely and happily serves up tasty analogies:
lichen as surface readers. as organic communities, lichens ignore depth in favour of the axis, the dimensional, the parataxis. they are expert non-discriminating counter-scholars of the layer, madly blanketing the rinds of trees and rocks, benches and metal, plastic, bone, and glass, regardless of elevation and climate. they are small kingdoms of likeness. (2, emphasis added).
In other (and less interesting) words: in Tierney’s hands, ecological writing does not avoid analogy completely, even as it is wary of one form of analogy—anthropomorphism. Rather, by following various paths that language discovers, Tierney finds lichen, looks over it without overlooking it, and alternates between the hard course of proper names and the more florid path of likeness. To reveal the “wow” of lichen, she toggles between deictics and analogy.
looking at the Tiny is a chapbook, and Tierney tells us that it will serve as a chapter in a longer volume. Though relatively short, it is a very generous piece of work. A mark of its generosity can be seen in what it elides. Welch’s “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen” takes an interesting turn about three-quarters through. Welch depicts himself as compelled to “kneel and peer at Tiny?”[4] Now, the word “tiny” (here taken as a proper name) is hard to take seriously. It veers on comedy or pathos. The notion of the poet being forced to genuflect before Tiny is striking and odd and more precious than pathetic. But Welch’s moment of revelation is not a send-up. We can tell, because at this point in the poem, Welch does something very unexpected. He goes full-on apocalyptic.
Thinking about pollution, Welch realizes that the lichen are indifferent to human ends. They are also immune to the end of humanity. He writes: “Let it all die.” He then imagines the (almost-dead) world split open again and opening up to life due to the lichen’s ability to split rock and dissolve salt. That is to say, he imagines a rebirth of the world by virtue of this,
scentless velvet,
crumbler-of-the-rocks,
this Lichen![5]
Now, I accept that thinking the apocalypse is necessary in our moment of the climate crisis. Effective ecological action depends on our confrontation with the possibility—the increasing probability—of the worst. But there is an odd aggrandizement in Welch’s words—why is he entitled to order the destruction of the world?—and with that aggrandizement, an odd pleasure. “Let it all die” is an imperative. To put it bluntly: Welch is ordering the destruction of our world.
It might be argued that I am misreading Welch’s statement. He might not be ordering the death of all Creation. He might be celebrating the fact that the conclusion of all life will not be conclusive. He might be claiming (as he surely is) that lichen will serve as the agents of a planetary rebirth. Fair enough. Nevertheless, I see a dreadful problem here, beyond asking how or why Welch is empowered to utter such a decree. I hear more than a touch of pleasure in contemplating, even willing, the destruction of the world as it presently exists. Although such destruction could conceivably serve as just punishment for the perps, how can it be just to order the suffering of the innocent?
Even if I am wrong about the imperious acceptance expressed in Welch’s “Let it all die,” that “all” remains insurmountable. Not only will the humans of this generation (and the next) suffer, but everything else will suffer as well. The collateral damage in this vision of apocalypse is simply staggering. Yes, life might return to the planet in the end, but this rebirth will be bought at the terrible expense of all previously living things. I am arguing that there is no justice in Welch’s apocalypse, even if he tries to explain that it is only temporary. (What use is an apocalypse that is only temporary, anyway?) Its transience is no consolation for all the beings that suffer in its wake. For them, it is permanent.
But at no point in looking at the Tiny does Tierney subscribe to Welch’s apocalypticism. While she might point to Welch as a model and a guide, she does not accept his hearty acceptance of mass extinction. This is no small thing. Her insistence on the particularity of lichen entails a concomitant insistence on the vulnerable specificity of the particular. She can accept analogy for all sorts of good reasons, because analogy is not the direct cause of suffering. It can act as the ground of greater comprehension and serve the cause of a more expansive justice. But she seems to draw the line at her mentor’s brash imperative. It is to Tierney’s credit that she scrubs the cruelty in Welch’s poem from her own. It could well be that her essay/poem’s greatest urgency lies in this small but generous act of elision. It is as if she were saying, “Let it all live.”
Notes:
[1] John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 303.
[2] Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Lectures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 209–10.
[3] Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill & Wang, 2015); Alva Noë, The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
[4] Lew Welch, “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen,” in Selected Poems (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1976), 84.
[5] Welch, “Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen,” 84–85.