Following his 2011 collection of short poems, “Riffraff,” English Prof. Stephen Cushman has released a book-length poem titled “The Red List.” An in-depth exploration of endangerment and modernity, “The Red List” is rich with insight about human interaction in the modern age. Cushman will read from “The Red List” at the University Bookstore with English Prof. Lisa Russ Spaar Thursday, Nov. 6 at 5:30 p.m.
Arts & Entertainment spoke with Cushman about his poetic process, his views on modern society and technology, and even the word “bae.”
Arts & Entertainment: “The Red List” begins and ends with eagles. What about the eagle, exactly, made it so compelling to you as a bookend to the poem?
Stephen Cushman: There’s nothing figurative about it. In my case it was very literal. The setting for that first eagle, and for many of them subsequently, is the coast of Maine where my family spent a lot of time. In the early ‘60s, when we started to spend time in Maine, the bald eagle was all but gone. Now, it’s back in abundance, and they’re quite beautiful — they’re just very striking. I’ve been fascinated by them in the last few years, and as I got thinking about them more and more I began to see them as this emblem of endangerment, recovered. Endangerment, recovered became then a larger metaphor for lots of things in the poem. The first line of the poem is, “Endangerment’s foreplay on the route to extinction.” But then the next line says, “Often but not always,” as in the bald eagle. The bald eagle is then the hopeful story. If you’re endangered, you hope to end up being a bald eagle and recover.
A&E: What sorts of cultural or social phenomena, then, do you extend endangerment to?
SC: There are overlapping layers of endangerment. There’s certainly the environmental endangerment. Another level is the story of a particular young man, and the endangerments that he’s in, but then he also becomes, I think, a kind of part for the whole for young people in general. It seems to me paralleling the environmental emergency of our moment, there’s a social emergency of our moment, and I think it has a lot to do with young people. This, in turn, parallels an economic emergency of our moment: where are you guys gonna go, how are you going to fit in? I’m old enough now that it looks as though I’ve done okay — I may not be alive tomorrow but I did okay up ‘til now. You’re at the beginning and you’re trying to figure out how you fit in, what’s gonna be your place. … There is a kind of sense of uncertainty, unease, at times confusion, about what’s gonna be available for you and what kind of world you’re looking at.
The [new] technology [is something] I have a love-hate relationship with. On the one hand, I can sit here and search a library anywhere in the world, how can I not like that? On the other hand, I wonder about the ways in which technology endangers, let’s say, some of our habits of reading, our habits of attention. It’s also my sense that even digital natives are beginning to question, what are the implications of all the gadgets for, let’s say, social life? What are the implications of all the gadgets for many kinds of social experience? Are they enhancements of experience, are they distractions from experiences, are they blockages?
A&E: With this in mind, then, would you consider your outlook on endangerment, and on technology, to be cynical?
SC: I hope not. The etymology of cynic is dog — cunos, a canine, just sort of a growling, negative person. What I would say is skeptic. I would hope [I have] a kind of healthy skepticism, because the way technology is presented to us is, “It’s gonna save everything; it makes everything better; it makes everything easier.” The University is all going over to technology — more and more of your work is going to be online. ... But I also want to say, “wait a minute.” What about certain kinds of person-to-person intimacy? What about certain kinds of — and here’s a big one — relations to the natural world?
A&E: Do you think the sorts of social endangerments created by technology can be recovered, like the eagle?
SC: Technology’s not going anywhere. It’s here. Anybody who sits around grumbling — you lose, buddy. The question is: how do we live with it? I can give you a solid example: Michael Levenson and I lecture in a big course, ENGL 3830, and we noticed a couple years ago nobody was paying attention. So, like DDT, we banned them [technology]. The class has improved. The quality of attention is better. So there would be a moment of endangerment that seems to have recovered. At least their heads are up.
A&E: You reference the Bible repeatedly throughout the poem, and it tends to contrast sharply with many other elements of modernity. Can you explain a bit about your choice to include so many Biblical allusions?
SC: The short answer is that the Bible is something I read daily. It’s important to me. It’s a part of the soundtrack of my life. So I can’t help but hear echoes and resonances in other things. But I think the bigger — what we’re really talking about — part of the poem is about the apparently sharp divide between the old or ancient, the new and modern. Does the new and the modern render extinct the old and the ancient? Does the fact you can text mean we don’t need the Bible? What I would say is, no, it can’t mean that. We’ve had some parts of the Bible for 3,000 years. The world has had plenty of technology emerge within 3,000 years. It looks as though the Bible is here to stay. What’s interesting is how you then accommodate the two. How does the Scriptural comment on, enhance, illuminate the ephemeral, the passing, the recent, the contemporary? And how does the recent and contemporary illuminate the ancient? I mean if you’re going to read it and younger people are going to read it, you’re going to have to find your own relationship to it. I have the Bible on my Kindle — there’s a good paradox right there!
A&E: Did you encounter any challenges, then, in using modern terms like “texting” in a poetic context? You don’t often find slang like that in literary contexts, but your use of it feels very natural.
SC: One of the things is, I love slang. I love the range. I love formal, long, classical words, but I love bits of vernacular, like the one I just learned from a class this summer — “bae.” I’d never heard that. But I go, “Wow!” and you find out what that means, and then that’s old hat, and there’s always something else and so on. To me, language is material. So the lingo of the digital world [is something] I find endlessly suggestive.
A&E: Can you talk a little about the poetic structure you chose? The use of haiku interspersed between long blocks of text seems very unique.
SC: The model is [from] the 17th century Japanese poet Basho. He wrote poetic diaries. The technical term is “haibun.” So he would write prose, and then a haiku. Prose, haiku. We [tend to] think of Basho as the master of haiku, but in fact what he really, for me, is the master of is this combination. So that’s the archetype. I don’t need prose, I just have blocks of long lines, and then there’s the little pit stop, [an] oasis [of] haiku. It gives you a chance to breathe, gives you a chance to calm down a little bit, [like a] kind of punctuation.
A&E: Your previous works of poetry have been collections of short poems. What influenced your choice to write a book-length poem this time?
SC: It’s always an ambition I’ve had. In the classical and Renaissance world, the understood training of a poet was a poet started as a lyric poet, but then became an epic poet. I think some sort of epic ambition has always been there for me. The other thing is that, having written a lot of short poems with clever, snappy closure, I began to be a little skeptical of them and their ability to accommodate the large, messy uncertainty of our world. Not everything comes to a neat close all the time. There are things on your mind and my mind that are ongoing and a nice little tight finish feels a little bit false.
A&E: Ultimately, do you feel the poem mostly reflects your personal experiences, or does it rely more upon observation?
SC: I’d say the full recipe would be: personal feeling, observation of the world around, imagination and reading — including online reading. I mean, I couldn’t have written this book without the Internet, because there’s so much stuff I looked up. … So there’s also a personal subject, a personal observer, a personal reader — and all those things go together. What I like is small to big, big to small, micro to macro, macro to micro, back and forth. That’s certainly an environmental ethic. Anything we do here has larger repercussions. Anything happening there has larger implications down here.
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