Ecomanifesto
Grammar of the Cage by Pam Ore. Les Figues Press, 2005. $13. Reviewed by Victoria Chang.
Pam Ore's Grammar
of the Cage is inspired by the author's background as a
zookeeper in Oklahoma City and Portland. But here there are no cute
barnyard animals and no children carrying balloons and lollipops:
Ore's landscape is that of the human condition. She uses the zoo as
a trope for entrapment and the ruin of the natural world, and
language in the form of poetry as a trope or human tool for both
freedom and destruction. Beyond the world of the zoo, Ore
investigates larger natural landscapes through the lens of one who
has witnessed, contributed to, and experienced entrapment.
Ore's subject matter is arresting; it is certainly not every day that
a zookeeper publishes a book of poems. Early in Ore's collection is
"Cutting Up Tamba," a poem about a speaker who must kill an elephant
in the zoo, dice it up, and dole out the parts to various
claimants:
The researcher and scientists moved in
like a cloudbank, with wishlists and
priorities:
The distal 12" of trunk and her head,
for the olfactory pits,
go to the gas lab for chemical
gateway studies; Seattle wants
her reproductive
tract - they're not sure
what for. The curator set the order,
then 15 of us, like crows, with hayhooks and
x-acto knives,
began cutting up
Tamba...
Such a poem is representative of the poet's perspective throughout
the collection.
Zoo animals as a metaphor for entrapment seems predictable, but Ore
throws the role of language into the mix and suddenly the
book opens up into grander possibilities. Ore views language as
both an opportunity to free animals and humans from their own
self-destruction, as well as the weapon of humans to ruin the earth,
as she articulates in "Grammar of the Cage":
When I see the bears behind blue bars,
and know language put them there,
what should I let stay unsaid, unprojected,
and what must I pull through myself
to help humans imagine a different
perspective? What is it I should not write
in order to give the earth half a chance?
In these poems, the
self is implicated, and that recognition of complicity is central to
the book's mission. After all, the zookeeper - the speaker of the
poem - helped to cut up the elephant. With the awareness of
self-implication, many of these poems still have a very strong
stance; without self-implication, these poems read more like
manifestos than poetry. In some instances, Ore's language is fresh
and lyrically engaging, as in "Evening":
My path leads straight into apathy
and humans sound like humming.
Sacred things are filled with red,
thinking requires ink
and my brain is composed of 80%
rain...
But the collection
would benefit from a heightened lyric intensity. In several
instances, the language falls flat, into a sort of reportage or
essayistic hypothesizing - language that lacks both rhythm and
lyricism. For example, "A Theory and Practice for Poetry in an Age
of Extinction and Environmental Collapse":
Language is an ecological adaption, an
evolved
behavior that helps humans negotiate the
environment,
to gain resource and reproductive
advantages.
Or in "Grammar of the Cage":
Language time has a beginning and an end,
a producer and a receiver. Non-language
time
is something produced between us, in endless
collaboration.
It's obvious the speaker has a particular point to make: Our natural world is gravely at risk; continued human destruction and apathy will ensure the demise of the natural world. It is when the writing is not superseded by the rhetorical stance that we hear Ore's true poetry.