Dennis James Sweeney’s You’re the Woods Too—a hybrid collection of interwoven poems, journal entries, visuals, and stage directions—masterfully intervenes on literary and social figurations of nature in evocative language. Early in the collection, the speaker offers a definition of that operative concept: “Nature (n): the part of the world WE cannot control, no matter how much WE claim to…When WE need assurance, WE venture into the forest.” The capitalized “WE”, along with the repetitions of “GREEN,” “MOSS,” “LARGE WHITE SHEET,” and “LONG LINE OF MEN”, suggest an unstable, constructed figure to be read as part of a larger trope that precedes the speaker. The speaker wants to muse on moss and green, render nature as a blankness to project onto, use nature as a setting for pastoral revelation as the canon does, gendered masculine and exclusive. The tropes are seductive, though the speaker acknowledges them as a series of follies, an exercising of myths. Nature is not controllable nor reassuring, and so they are forced to wonder what else nature could be, or what they are without its assurance: “I went out into the woods to find myself and there myself was: wine-drunk stumbling backwards into the future.” Surreally and syntactically, “myself” remains outside the speaker, unstable and disappointing.
Such a view counters the pastoral tradition of poets venturing to remote areas to discover their own spirits, reveling in beauty ostensibly unavailable in urban landscapes. While the “anti-pastoral” has emerged to correct the pastoral’s romantic inaccuracies, and the necropastoral to reflect the decay of the Anthropocene, Sweeney occupies a different though related ecopoetics. His deconstructs the assumptions of the pastoral from the perspective of a speaker that desires wisdom and retreat within nature yet finds it wanting, all within the specter of climate collapse. Declarations riddle the collection (“Every storm a myth”, “Nature is a stomach”) before they inevitably extend into doubt:
I went out to the woods to find myself but the self I found
was mummified, buried in a pyramid of used cell
phones and writhing dogs.
and
I want to say: The mindlessness of the forest is a violence.
But the forest is a little boy throwing rocks into a pond. If I get hurt,
it’s because I swim toward the ripples.
Pastoral certainty evades the speaker, disrupting their expectation that going out into the woods will yield insight. Both nature’s definition and the speaker’s self are undermined by the other: the self buried in decay, the forest by their own lack of awareness. The speaker comes to know this simultaneity in stark terms: “But who was I? The problem is, I went out in the woods / to find myself and there was nothing to find.”
The speaker’s yearning and failure echoes Sweeney’s debut collection In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press, 2021). A pastoral critique itself, though less overt than You’re the Woods Too, the forest is replaced by the desolate ice of the South Pole, its characters searching for a fulfillment in Antarctica’s imagined frontier and whiteness, a “history [to] be written tabula rasa by Great (White) Men.”¹ The characters predictably find though, like with the speaker in You’re the Woods Too, that fulfillment elides, that the landscapes resist their (White) figurations. You’re the Woods Too’s short poems titled with moss species’ scientific names, use the moss’s perspective to powerfully counterpoint the characters’ arrogant investment in myths. While the moss often describe their expected environment (“Speak of the clouds / Leaves like stained glass”, “The ground every morning is built like a calf”), the moss speakers veer away from any pastoral expectation, anthropomorphizing towards mundane, human behavior. This is best evidenced in “Selaginella oregana”:
I like living normally
[…]
I like feeling bad
For not being exceptional
And going to the store and buying ice cream
And letting it melt in the car.
Sweeney demonstrates how a perspective that animates natural life also has the potential to paradoxically resist the human gaze, subverting the pastoral mode itself. Such incongruity puts the very idea of “writing retreat” into question, even as the speaker invests in the environments of their arrival. We begin to learn of the speaker’s life, wherein retreat is a maladaptive compulsion (“The problem is that when I retreat, I also retreat from myself. // Where am I when I go into the woods? Gone.”) to move away from a nourishing home life (“Maybe I was more at peace than I thought I was”). For Sweeney’s speakers, retreating to nature substitutes rather than accomplishes spiritual satisfaction.
Figure 1: I found this chair amidst old mining structures at the foot of the Rocky Mountains on the Mayflower Gulch trail outside of Leadville, Colorado at an altitude of approximately 11,000 feet. The chair was in good condition, clearly brought by another hiker in recent months.
I finished reading You’re the Woods Too while on my first writing retreat in Leadville, Colorado, courtesy of Inverted Syntax. I’ve written elsewhere about my travel experiences in central and eastern Europe on a self-guided Jewish and family trip, the expected insight that did not come, and the opacity that continues to ensue. As I embarked on a retreat in the beautiful, pristine mountains, I wondered how to describe my emotional response to the place without claiming personal transformation. I loved Leadville and am grateful for the comfortable conditions that made spending time there and in the adjacent mountains possible. Above the tree-line in the Mayflower Gulch, I found a chair ready for sitting (Figure 1), as well as old mining structures that wreck the earth at an even higher altitude than I can breathe to reach. The Gold Rush miners must’ve seen the beauty even as they mined the ground and struggled for breath and through the elements’ and settled native Ute land.
I, too, experienced a sense of awe: I had an indulgent temptation to settle and claim Leadville and its mountains as my own just as the LONG LINE OF MEN have done with the pastoral. But precedent is not enough to claim an ethics. Rather, it is precisely the precedent of colonial myths concerning nature that compel a poetics as overtly contrarian to the pastoral as Sweeney’s. The chair gestures towards presences and absences simultaneously, as a body is implied even as the seat remains vacant, as is the implied history of unlabeled mining structures. “Absence” is illusory since Indigenous life endures, as does its displacement and the earth’s mining, just beyond my gaze from the gulch. Yet the chair to me signifies an outsider’s claim, a comfort that enables a photoshoot, a drawn sketch, writing: all a kind of gold, the stuff of canon. We are all in the woods and excavating, out of the woods dreaming of frontiers. In You’re the Woods Too, Sweeney models for readers another type of dreaming.
You’re the Woods Too is published by Essay Press and is available to order through their website, as well as through Small Press Distribution and Bookshop.
¹Lize-Marié van der Watt and Sandra Swart, as quoted in Dennis James Sweeney, In the Antarctic Circle (Autumn House Press, 2021), 4.
XANDER GERSHBERG‘s poetry is found or forthcoming in FENCE, Plume, Inverted Syntax, Poetry Online, Strange Horizons, Blue Arrangements, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor for MAYDAY and on Spout Press’s editorial collective. He is completing his MFA in creative writing at Virginia Tech, where he teaches writing.