"Half sun. Half thinking." Jared Stanley's Western Poetics (Just Deserts, part 2)


Jared Stanley’s 2012 collection The Weeds (Salt: London) represents a development in western poetics.  Stanley’s writing sees human interactions as part of the “natural world,” and connects not just to Romantic landscape imagery, but to the intricacies of scientific representations, as well.  That’s not the development, though.  There’s plenty of western writing that sees the ecological perspective (interwoven, interactive) instead of the environmental (anthropocentric, isolated).  What I find fresh about Stanley’s poetics is that it’s not elegiac.  Stanley’s not quietly weeping while the glaciers bleed out.  Neither is he proselytizing on the street-corner, or, more applicably, from a laptop in an air conditioned apartment.  In his wild, wide-ranging new book, Stanley’s clear-eyed about the situation vis-à-vis global warming, extinction spiral, etc.:

your children’s children’s children will be hanging around someplace.  It might resemble the landscape you see situated before you.  Hot as shit, (taking into account local variation), semi-non-permanent, some earthenware, knuckles and dirt.  Adjectives, if they still exist, will include skulking, nasty, portable, blasted, cunning.

I had the opportunity to work with Jared Stanley recently on a conversation poem, based on our recent work in issue 14 of textsound.  The result of our collaboration is a sound piece that will appear in The Conversant sometime soon (I think / hope).  The process gave me an opportunity to look again and more closely at The Weeds, and to extract from it a sequence of my favorite passages.  Taken together, I think they make a pretty swell sort of assemblage.  I like it, and hope you do too.


I was born to high radiation high
winds and high temperatures
red peaks, lunar imitations and swamp coolers.

Half sun.  Half thinking.

Ruby-throated in the paloverde
we came near this town. 
My mind came out in a culvert
and the year came alive.

Then, as I say “paleolithic cosmonauts landed the so-called starblower here,” your arms should bend up, and your hands should form a diamond made of index fingers and thumbs around the sun.

It would be easier to use a rock to tell you about this, knock two of them together and let you hear the cold dullness hollowly moving off the sheer granite and out towards the low valley tract homes.

Our infiltrated beautiful hair.
Our upended astrodome.

The sediment buried them, and the silica laden waters infiltrated the flesh, duplicating its structure cell by cell, becoming jasper, agate, and amethyst.

Under God’s cloud-eating heart
the heat falls.

Can we say it, that weeds are the intelligence of a disturbed earth?

If a head’s full of sky
laying down its sand
faith’s a little disappointing.

As if your faith or my books gave the sun much orange.

I’ll have clouds surrounding my torso, thanks.

The water was held by the rock, reminding you that you aren’t floating, that you are a thing.

My body quivers into a receipt
twisted by the wind and wrapped around scrub
—there’s a dry piece of coyote shit—

Weeds outlast this sentence. 
Considered thoughts become angular, subordinate feelings. 
Weeds outlast this sentence.

The sky jerks open.

Desert.  Italicize it.

Fine.  Good.  Let’s go. 



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