My friend once suggested we hold a poetry reading at a local, failing mall. Most of the stores are empty and even the food court there has folded up. He thought a joint reading and dance party would be appropriate, but alas, the liquor license would be impossible to acquire and there was something that felt overtly ironical about the gesture of reading poetry in a place that was economically decimated. And even though there is not a malicious bone in my friend’s body, the act of reading and dancing in that place felt–intentionally or unintentionally–cruel.

As the first layers of oil now reach the Alabama and Mississippi coastlines, I’m beginning to see my friend was not intending irony. He was saying, I think, this place, in all its ruinedness, is still a place and we need to honor it as such. Granted, an entire eco-system was not destroyed in a failing mall (no, that is the failure of our presumptions about consumption and making, about how far our money would go and for what, about an economy on the brink of disaster). The Gulf Coast shoreline that will be decimated over the coming months is supposed to be composed of ill-tempered gannets, dunes whose shapes vary by the day, and plenty of horizons, which implies wonder and introspection, humility perhaps.

Of course, the oil barges interrupt those horizons, and now one of those companies wells have ruined the shore. As a poet, I’ve always been interested by space–what it says about its inhabitants, a history and a future. Why we write so much about place: to feel small and part of some larger order. I sit tonight thinking about the time I got lost in a national forest and discovered a family’s grave site dating back to the 1820s. Eventually, I was picked up a guy who did not want to be found by the census bureau, and in his beat up GM truck, he pointed to random thickets and swamps in the forest and said, here’s where the paper mill is, there’s where the Ashtons live–both had ceased in the 1930s, but still he used the present tense. There is no doubt that much of that forest had been altered and ruined due to hubris and folly–though obviously not to such an enormous degree as the present day Gulf. Yet, the forest today remains –cypress and twisted metal, rifle shells and armadillos sleeping–the living and the ruined.

The Gulf’s being destroyed and I don’t believe poetry can do much to stop that–but it can, as the saying goes, bear witness. But to bear witness is not only to be caught in the dead birds or the oil itself, but to see the land–ruined by our own making, altered forever–as a place itself, with a people and a story and a narrative. To see it beyond distaster, worth saving not just now but forty years from now–mostly through the hard work of preservation–but also, in a more minor way, through frequenting it, writing about it, thinking about it as evolving and outside the scope of human intention, even as humans harm it again and again.

–Joseph