C HRISTOPHER TODD A NDERSON

Sacred Waste: Ecology, Spirit, and

the American Garbage Poem

Only human beings make garbage, a strange category of material

created by people but then shunned, removed as far as possible from
our presence because it has become revolting or worthless. When
other creatures produce waste, it is integrated back into nature on a
relatively quick basis; one does not think of animal droppings or an
abandoned birds’ nest as rubbish.1 We humans have an equivocal
relationship with the garbage we produce, for it is a marginal sub-
stance, normally located in a dump just outside of town, in a
compost pile at the edge of one’s property, or in a littered roadside
ditch. In practical terms, it makes perfect sense to place our dumps
near enough to allow for convenient use, but far enough away that
we avoid their repugnant qualities. Nonetheless, the placement of
our waste symbolizes the marginal status of garbage both as a
material substance and as a concept. Because it includes both organic
matter (such as discarded food, plant matter, and bodily waste) and
inorganic material (including artificial products such as plastics and
other manufactured items), garbage exists on the border between the
natural and the artificial and, by extension, between human culture
and wild nature. To the ecologist, borders between ecosystems—the
seashore’s intertidal zone or the margin where forest and meadow
meet—are particularly worthy of study because of their abundant
biodiversity. Garbage, too, is a liminal substance, existing as it does
on the edges of human society. One definition of liminal (from the
Latin limen, or threshold) denotes a transitional condition, and any
ecological system enacts this meaning when matter is transferred

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.1 (Winter 2010)

Advance Access publication February 4, 2010 doi:10.1093/isle/isp155
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 36 I S L E

from one state to another via physical processes. Garbage is liminal

in this most basic sense when, if conditions are suitable, waste pro-
ducts gradually break down to be transformed into other materials. It
is an evocative substance, both patently material and psychologically
resonant.
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk and popularizer of
Buddhist practice for Westerners, has noted the continuity between
the pure beauty of a rose and the rot of garbage, for their dichotomy
exists “only when we look on the surface. If we look more deeply we
will see that in just five or six days, the rose will become part of the
garbage [ . . . ]. The rose and the garbage are equal. The garbage is
just as precious as the rose” (96 – 97). There is, indeed, a fundamental
ambiguity at the heart of garbage. What exactly is it, after all, that dis-
tinguishes waste from that which is beautiful or useful? An alumi-
num can tossed into the weeds along a rural roadside is litter;
however, the artificial product becomes part of the natural landscape,
still recognizably manmade, but no longer situated within a human
context. To take a more intimate example, when does bodily waste—
whether excrement, blood from a wound, or a fingernail clipping—
cease to be part of the human body, something we claim as part of
ourselves? And what does it mean when our individual waste moves
through collective sanitation systems and becomes what we euphe-
mistically call the “waste stream”? It has been said that the establish-
ment of civilization is predicated upon the exclusion of whatever is
considered to be dangerous and unsavory, whether it be untamed
wilderness or human-produced rubbish. How we think about
various kinds of waste therefore raises fundamental questions about
how we understand ourselves and our place in the natural world.
Like the ecosystems of marginal spaces, garbage offers rich oppor-
tunities for study. While the creation of garbage may be unique to the
human species, it is also a particularly American phenomenon, for
Environmental Protection Agency estimates indicate that the United
States produces 30% of the world’s waste despite having only 4% of
its population (H. Rogers 2). Given that an average of one thousand
six hundred pounds of refuse is produced annually for every person
in the country, perhaps it is not surprising that books analyzing the
problem of waste management and the cultural meanings of garbage
in the United States have become common. In Rubbish! The
Archeology of Garbage, William Rathje and Cullen Murphy report the
findings of the University of Arizona’s Garbage Project, which under
Rathje’s direction has excavated and analyzed American landfills
using the methodologies of archeology, anthropology, and the bio-
logical sciences. Historian Susan Strasser’s Waste and Want: A Social

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 The American Garbage Poem 37

History of Trash explores the history of waste management and exam-

ines the social and cultural meanings of garbage in American society,
while Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash and
Heather Rogers’s Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage offer jour-
nalistic investigations into where garbage, sewage, and other waste
products go when they leave our homes for collection, treatment,
recycling, or dumping by various municipal and corporate entities.2
Garbage is interpreted diversely in these texts, variously representing
a threat of environmental harm, the historical movement toward
cleanliness in the name of public health, the wastefulness of
American consumerism, the role of big business in creating a throw-
away society, and a wide-ranging record of tastes, trends, and
cultural habits.
Meditations on the multifaceted meanings of garbage have not
been limited to the work of social scientists and journalists, but have
appeared regularly in American poetry over the past half-century.
The physically marginal location of garbage, its melding of natural
and artificial material, and its function as a mirror of culture are
reflected in poems by Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Robert
Duncan, Theodore Roethke, Maxine Kumin, A. R. Ammons, and
Pattiann Rogers. In their work, garbage marks the boundaries
between several seeming dichotomies. Contemplation of trash and
waste places permits the investigation of the sometimes ambiguous
borders between the human and the nonhuman, the artificial and the
natural, growth and decay, the material and the spiritual, the ephem-
eral and eternal, art and trash, life and death. These authors compli-
cate our usual sense of garbage as repugnant by viewing it in
spiritual terms and as a substance through which to examine human
culture and its relationship to the natural world. Although some of
these poems advocate stewardship of the earth and acknowledge the
threat posed by garbage as a pollutant, they are not protest poems
decrying environmental degradation. Thus they differ from typical
examples of ecopoetry that celebrate the beauty of wild nature or
condemn environmentally destructive human activity. Exploring in
often reverential terms how garbage links our species to nature’s eco-
logical cycles, these poems portray dumps, compost heaps, and other
waste places as sites of self-reflection and as unexpected emblems of
spiritual and ecological renewal. For poets seeking redemptive value
and spiritual significance in what we normally consider to be repel-
lent, garbage serves as a meeting point of human culture, the natural
world, and the spiritual realm.
A. R. Ammons’s Garbage is probably the best-known contempor-
ary garbage poem, having received substantial attention from critics

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 38 I S L E

considering the poem’s relation to the problem of waste management

in twentieth-century America. Scholars such as Lorraine DiCicco,
Willard Spiegelman, Gyorgyi Voros, and Frederick Buell have exam-
ined the varied meanings of garbage in Ammons’s long poem, in
some cases linking it to the kind of cultural histories I have men-
tioned or to earlier poems such as Walt Whitman’s “This Compost”
and Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump.”3 My own purpose is
to note the existence of a larger body of poetry on the subject of
garbage and to make the case that such texts form a small but distinct
trend in American environmental poetry. By examining these poems
within the context of environmental thought, we will see that
garbage poetry maintains certain attitudes associated with
Romanticism, pastoralism, and the sublime, but that such poetry also
departs from these traditions in ways that reflect the particular sig-
nificance of garbage in contemporary culture.
American garbage poetry could be said to begin with Whitman’s
“This Compost,” in which the human corpse appears as a repulsive
waste object that is initially shunned, then revealed to be the site of
ecological transformation. By asking how one should react to the
knowledge that the earth is full of diseased corpses, Whitman antici-
pates the kind of questions that have been asked more recently about
how American society should deal with the garbage that, because of
its sheer quantity, both fascinates and repels us. Expressing horror at
the presence of decaying human bodies within the earth, Whitman
wonders how healthy food can be grown from soil contaminated
with the “foul meat” of the innumerable “sour dead” (ll. 16, 10).4 But
the initial horror gives way to an epiphany regarding the conserva-
tion of matter and the power of nature to purify waste. “What chem-
istry!” Whitman exclaims upon realizing that nourishing crops grow
from soil polluted with diseased corpses: “Now I am terrified at the
Earth, it is that calm and patient, / It grows such sweet things out of
such corruptions” (31, 42– 43).
Omitted here are Whitman’s exuberant catalogs of living flora and
fauna: spring grass, bean and onion sprouts, fruit orchards, hatching
chickens, and so forth. Most of the references are to food sources, rein-
forcing the idea that life and health arise from the putrefying corpses.
Though acknowledging the dreadfulness of death, Whitman ultimately
declares that “all is clean forever” both physically and spiritually,
echoing the sentiment expressed in “Song of Myself” that the corpse is
“good manure” and life “the leavings of many deaths” (ll. 1294, 1297).
Whitman’s original title for “This Compost” was “Poem of Wonder at
The Resurrection of The Wheat,” emphasizing the divine element he
perceived in the growth of food from the composted corpse.5

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 The American Garbage Poem 39

M. Jimmie Killingsworth has recently declared “This Compost” to

be “Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology”
(11).6 Because it portrays the human body as a kind of garbage,
Whitman’s poem has also been read as a precursor to Ammons’s
Garbage, in which repellent subject matter is similarly intertwined
with meditations on the aging human body, ecological cycles, and
the spiritual qualities of this most lowly of subjects. The poem’s
primary emblem is a landfill near Interstate 95 in Florida, a setting
that is both repugnantly material and transcendently spiritual.
Ammons declares that “garbage has to be the poem of our time
because / garbage is spiritual,” then portrays the huge mound of
rubbish as a late-twentieth-century American equivalent to pre-
modern temples:

the garbage trucks crawl as if in obeisance,

as if up ziggurats toward the high places gulls
and garbage keep alive, offerings to the gods
of garbage. (18)

The spontaneous combustion of garbage fires creates an “everlasting

flame,” while their smoke represents the dump’s “sacrificial bounty”
(19). Heavy doses of humor and postmodern irony flavor Ammons’s
depiction of the landfill as a symbol of the nation and as a spiritual
icon, but the admiration for ecological processes is genuine.7
Like Whitman, Ammons admires garbage as an emblem of eco-
logical renewal and contemplates the status of the human body as
just one more piece of garbage to be discarded. Ammons is less
graphic than Whitman on this point, but viewing the Florida landfill
leads him to ponder his own aging body and the fact of being
“merely an old person” (22) whose corpse will eventually become
subject to natural recycling. Ammons slyly dedicated Garbage to “the
bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers, wordsmiths—the transfigurers,
restorers,” and the poem additionally addresses the relationship
between trash and literature, depicting the poet as a transformer and
recycler of language.8
“This Compost” and Garbage might stand as their respective cen-
turies’ pillars of garbage poetry and serve as useful introductions to
themes encountered in other examples of the genre. Noting Suzanne
Seriff ’s argument that garbage exists outside the usual social norms
of ownership and economics, Voros argues that “rubbish is material
approaching a condition analogous to that of wilderness in nature
and the subconscious in the human psyche,” (173), a comment that
aptly suggests how garbage poems ponder the spiritual and

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 40 I S L E

ecological implications of rubbish by exploring (as if it were wilder-

ness) the shared border of human and nonhuman materiality. One
could trace the development of the garbage poem from Whitman’s
description of the human body as garbage, through T. S. Eliot’s depic-
tion of wind-blown paper and the dirty Thames in The Waste Land,
and on to Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump.”9 I pick up the trail of
garbage, however, in the post-WWII era with Howard Nemerov’s
“The Town Dump,” which emphasizes the dump’s isolation from
humanity: it lies a “mile out in the marshes,” though it mirrors the
human realm as “the city / Which seconds ours” (1, 4 – 5). Among
food scraps and other materials, one discovers that this landfill is a
place of worth as well as waste:
Objects of value or virtue,
However, are also to be picked up here,
Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat,
Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels
No one will skid on, apple cores that caused
Neither the fall of man nor a theory
Of gravitation. People do throw out
The family pearls by accident, sometimes,
Not often. (142 – 43)
Antiques dealers, the poem adds, go there by night in search of
cast-off items to resell.10 Nemerov underscores the physicality of the
dump, pointing out that it contains no iconic apples of Eden or
Newton, but only rotting food interspersed with items discarded by
people who failed to recognize their value. The dump itself holds a
similarly undervalued significance, for it teems with life that
flourishes amid the decaying waste:
For there are flies, of course. A dynamo
Composed, by thousands, of our ancient black
Retainers, hums here day and night, steady
As someone telling beads, the hum becoming
A high whine at any disturbance. (143)
The biotic energy at work here is both sacred and ecological: flies,
likened to the devout at prayer, circle amidst “purefying fires” (53)
generated by the methane and heat the immense piles of garbage
produce:
All this continually smoulders,
Crackles, and smokes with mostly invisible fires
Which, working deep, rarely flash out and flare,

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 The American Garbage Poem 41

And never finish. Nothing finishes;

The flies, feeling the heat, keep on the move. (143)
Though eternal, this fire is not exactly hellish. Instead, natural cycles
and primal forces are at work in the dump, where our ephemeral
daily trash feeds the unending process through which matter is
broken down into elementary particles that can be recycled into other
substances. Both flies and fire play a role in these processes that, as
depicted by Nemerov, take on a numinous quality.
As the poem concludes, Nemerov addresses those who want to
make sense of the dump’s confused scene:
You may sum up
The results, if you want results. But I will add
That wild birds, drawn to the carrion and flies,
Assemble in some numbers here, their wings
Shining with light, their flight enviably free,
Their music marvelous, though sad, and strange. (143– 44)
Making use of what others have discarded, scavengers (both human
and animal) are common at many dumps, but Nemerov’s squawking
birds—presumably gulls and other carrion-eaters—are oddly angelic:
their life, light, flight, and music rises above the decaying waste on
which they feed. If we are willing to overcome our simple revulsion,
Nemerov suggests, we will recognize beauty and witness transcen-
dence even here.
It should not be surprising that several garbage poems appeared
during the economic boom of postwar America, for the underside of
that era’s prosperity was the rampant wastefulness of an emerging
throwaway society. Nemerov would address similar issues in poems
such as “Life Cycle of the Common Man,” but the influence of subur-
ban consumer culture is also evident in Richard Wilbur’s “Junk.”
Examining the contents of a neighbor’s curbside trash can, Wilbur
notices a discarded axe handle and
a shellheap
Of plastic playthings,
paper plates,
And the sheer shards
of shattered tumblers. (261)
Like Ammons comparing the Florida landfill to a Babylonian zig-
gurat, Wilbur draws a parallel between the dump to which the trash
will go and the dolmens and barrows of Anglo-Saxon religious and
cultural rites; taking our garbage to the curb has, after all, become a

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 42 I S L E

weekly ceremony in American society.11 As he considers his neigh-

bor’s garbage and its destination in a landfill, Wilbur expresses an
ambivalence often present in garbage poems. His “heart winces” at
the sight of this poorly-made junk, but the poem ends with a
redemptive vision in which the artificiality of these products recedes
as they revert to a more natural state:
They shall waste in the weather
toward what they were.
The sun shall glory
in the glitter of glass-chips,
Foreseeing the salvage
of the prisoned sand. (43 – 48)
The paint on wooden objects, meanwhile, will peel away until “the
good grain / be discovered again” (51 – 52). Finally, the garbage will
be burnt, bulldozed, and
buried
To the depth of diamonds,
in the making dark
Where halt Hephaestus
keeps his hammer
And Wayland’s work
is worn away. (262)
When broken glass erodes to sand and when wood grain is revealed
beneath paint, these manufactured items return to a more essential
form of existence and thus escape the artificial qualities imposed by
human beings. In the earth’s “making dark”—realm of the legendary
smiths Hephaestus and Wayland—natural processes will allow
garbage to recover its place in nature, thus transcending its dimin-
ished status as man-made refuse.12
Curbside trash cans and modern landfills are potent emblems of
postwar American culture, but Robert Duncan explores waste in a
more mythic context in “Nor Is the Past Pure,” a poem emphasizing
the extent to which both nature and human history are built upon
decaying, castoff garbage:
This is the Book of the Earth, the field of grass
flourishing.
This is the region that feeds forth souls
under the old orders
returning to the dominion of its King and Queen.
It is only the midden heap, Beauty: shards,

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 The American Garbage Poem 43

scraps of leftover food, rottings,

the Dump
where we read history, larvae of all dead things,
mixd seeds, waste, off-castings, despised
treasure, vegetable putrifactions
: from this adultery committed,
the plant that provides, Corn
that at Eleusis Kore brought
out of Hell, health manifest. [ . . . ]
This is the Book of the Provider. (43)

According to Duncan, the midden heap’s “despised treasure”

includes the history of human culture and the ecological renewal that
coexist in the dump. Rathje and Murphy write that “the creation of
garbage is an unequivocal sign of a human presence” and identify
garbage as “a mirror of American society,” albeit a broken mirror
consisting of innumerable fragments deposited in dumps nationwide
(10, 11). The metaphor they employ is reminiscent of Duncan’s depic-
tion of human history as a collection of shards and debris mingling
with organic matter that alternately decays and flourishes.
The kind of ecological transformation Nemerov, Wilbur, and
Duncan envision is mostly a myth when it comes to American dumps,
for Rathje and his Garbage Project colleagues have revealed that very
little biodegradation takes place in modern landfills due to the compac-
tion of waste and the resulting lack of oxygen to facilitate composting.13
Still, the trope of beneficial natural processes purifying and transform-
ing trash is a powerful one, and both the Garbage Project and garbage
poetry represent attempts to piece together the fragments of our refuse
in a way that reveals truths about human culture and the biosphere.
If garbage is emblematic of culture in general, waste places can
also evoke more personal meditations. This is true in Theodore
Roethke’s “The Far Field,” a title that again suggests distance from
the human realm. Much of the poem describes in symbolic terms a
journey of psychic self-exploration, but the most ecologically signifi-
cant landscape appears in the poem’s second section, which is set in
a littered waste place at the edge of a field, an image derived from
Roethke’s childhood memories of the property surrounding his
family’s commercial greenhouses. As in Nemerov’s poem, Roethke
depicts this territory as a place of abundant wildlife, decaying nature,
and human-produced rubbish. A spiritual resonance emerges in this
human/nonhuman borderland, for the physical world of the littered
land provides knowledge of eternity:

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 44 I S L E

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,

Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery,—
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and
ground-beetles
(I found it lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman. (193)

This marginal space contains both living and dead animals and
includes a collection of natural and artificial materials gathered
together haphazardly. Despite the litter and decay, the scene evokes a
rather bucolic mood through the far field’s isolation and through
references to rural creatures such as the cat-bird and field-mouse.
Even the watchman’s assault on nature has played out, as it were, off
stage. We are struck less by disgust than by a sense of the mystery
inherent in a world where the grotesque materials of death and decay
are inseparable from the processes of regeneration that culminate in
this landscape’s plentiful life.
Natural cycles are evident in the rain and beetles consuming the
dead rat, images that remind us that life is nourished by the products
of death. The waste place of the far field is, furthermore, rich in living
biodiversity: grass is abundant, along with mice, birds, and other
flora and fauna. Human beings, one can infer, rarely come here—
presumably only the night watchman making an occasional patrol or
greenhouse employees dumping flowers. The cans, tires, old machin-
ery, and other human artifacts will take longer to decay, but seem to
have become part of the natural landscape. The waste-strewn field is
a transitional territory connecting the artificial and the natural, and it
is, moreover, a setting in which the poet discerns eternity’s imma-
nence within the physical reality of a particular place.
Inhospitable waste places have long served as settings for spiritual
contemplation. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, we
might recall the desert fathers in their hermitages, inspired by Christ
tempted in the desert and Moses alone atop Sinai. Spiritual struggle
often occurs during periods of isolation, but real solitude is rarely
available in more welcoming locations. For twentieth-century poets
like Nemerov and Roethke, one achieves such isolation not by retreat-
ing to the pastoral realms of woods or riverside, but by heading for

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 The American Garbage Poem 45

the landfill or the trash-littered field in the isolated place “missed by

the mower.”
The elegiac tone of “The Far Field” is echoed by the poet Mary
Oliver in her essay “Waste Land: An Elegy,” which discusses the
paving-over of an abandoned dump near her home. Oliver acknowl-
edges the need for an improved waste-management facility, but
regrets the loss of the plants, birds, and animals she encountered
among the collection of discarded tires and shingles. And yet, despite
her distaste for the noise made by boys crisscrossing the area on
motorbikes, she is sympathetic toward their use of the old dump as a
place of free recreation. Willard Spiegelman makes a similar point
about the emotional value of waste places in Ammons’s poem “The
City Limits,” noting that a dump or recycling station at the edge of
town is “where control, tightness, and everything associated with
centrality give way to freedom, disorder, and entropy” (62). What
Nemerov and Roethke suggest in their poems is that the freedom of
waste places extends both to the natural world and to human beings.
Because people rarely visit such territories, wild nature can thrive
beyond the range of human domination. Similarly, people themselves
can escape the restrictions and distractions imposed by their own
civilization. By rescuing valuables from the dump, Nemerov’s
antique-hunters operate outside the usual confines of capitalist pro-
duction and consumption, while Roethke achieves psychological and
spiritual insight where society’s cast-off material goods lie scattered
among weeds.
Roethke’s experience amid the far field’s waste also leads to a
breakdown of the human – nonhuman dichotomy. “I suffered for
birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,” he writes, “For to
come upon warblers in early May / Was to forget time and death”
(24, 26– 27). This empathy develops into a more fundamental identifi-
cation with the natural world when Roethke imagines lying naked in
a river’s shallows, pondering his relationship to the nonhuman:
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar. (193)
The shell—a natural bit of debris from a living organism—is analo-
gous to the trash that elicits similarly thoughtful moments in the far
field. Biographical sources indicate that Roethke felt an intense identi-
fication with the natural world throughout his life, in some cases
manifested through mystical experiences of union with plants and
animals.14 The far field with its organic and artificial garbage thus

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 46 I S L E

leads Roethke to a recognition of his own place in the world vis-à-vis

nonhuman creatures. The waste place avoided by people because it
offers nothing valuable in fact helps Roethke to comprehend his
participation in longstanding cycles of life, death, decay, and
regeneration:

I learned not to fear infinity,

The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water. (194)

In these concluding lines to section two of “The Far Field,” Roethke

comes to terms with death and eternity by recognizing the ecological
processes at work in the dump beyond his father’s greenhouses. The
epiphany comes, however, not via any rational precision of language,
but through an accumulation of images that begins with the far
field’s junk and culminates in the conflation of wind, wave, and light
that collectively represent the natural world’s sublime danger and
invigorating beauty. Later sections of the poem leave the littered field
behind, but the meditation initiated there continues with Roethke’s
claim that “All finite things reveal infinitude” (195), for those finite
things must include not only the majestic natural features (moun-
tains, trees, snow) he refers to later in the poem, but also the human-
created trash and decaying animals previously recorded. In earlier
poems such as “The Minimal” and “Slug,” Roethke extended his
vision to encompass the full range of nature’s fauna, including lowly
creatures such as invertebrates and microbes. In “The Far Field,” the
perception that eternity exists amid the natural and human detritus
of the overlooked waste place is, in a sense, an extension of Roethke’s
long-term fascination with nature’s less-majestic species and settings.
The most intimate human garbage is also that which repels us
most: excrement. Maxine Kumin has appreciatively considered this
most repellent substance in several poems, often finding beauty in
the ecological cycles manure represents. Kumin and her husband
own a New Hampshire horse farm, and in “The Excrement Poem,”
she ponders the shape and consistency of the manure she shovels
daily. For Kumin, excrement is ecumenical, for “It is done by us all”
and (like the trash in Nemerov’s dump and Roethke’s far field) it
bridges the perceived gap between people and animals (1). Not only
is the act of defecation a great leveler of species, but its fertilizing
capability affirms the possibility of regeneration out of foulness. For

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 The American Garbage Poem 47

Kumin, excrement represents the ability of diverse organisms to

flourish amid waste. She sees
how sparrows come to pick
the redelivered grain, how inky-cap
coprinus mushrooms spring up in a downpour.
I think of what drops from us and must then
be moved to make way for the next and next.
However much we stain the world, spatter
it with our leavings, make stenches, defile
the great formal oceans with what leaks down,
trundling off today’s last barrowful,
I honor shit for saying: We go on. (Ground Time 72)
To honor one’s shit is to validate one’s participation in natural cycles
which “go on” eternally. It is to reclaim a place in nature, thus resist-
ing our tendency in today’s society to isolate ourselves from nature’s
daily rhythms. Kumin is not suggesting that we eliminate modern
amenities, but in emphasizing spatter and stench she reminds us that
our corporeality links us directly to the animal world. Excrement
thus leads to contemplation of our very real participation in natural
cycles, but also represents symbolically the need to leave behind ego-
centric and anthropocentric attitudes, to make way for “the next and
next” on an ecological scale and to correct the various ways in which
we stain the natural world.
Animal manure and human-produced rubbish play similar roles
in Kumin’s “The Brown Mountain,” the title of which refers to a
compost pile that breaks down whatever “dies out of us and our
creatures, / out of our fields and gardens” (Long Marriage 35).15 The
bulk of the poem catalogs materials placed on the pile, including
plant waste (frost-blackened nasturtiums, sunflower heads, milkweed
stalks), food waste (coffee grounds, egg shells, moldy potatoes), and
animal waste (horse manure, rabbit pellets, and the sheep’s “raisins /
of useful dung”). But, in an homage to the transformative power of
composting, Kumin observes that the pile’s heat purifies and makes
useful even the most revolting substances:
Compost is our future.
The turgid brown mountain
steams, releasing
the devil’s own methane vapor,
cooking our castoffs so that from
our spatterings and embarrassments—
cat vomit, macerated mice,

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 48 I S L E

rotten squash, burst berries,

a mare’s placenta, failed melons,
dog hair, hoof pairings—arises
a rapture of blackest humus. (36)
Kumin has called herself an antipastoral poet, and she pulls no
punches in this list of the repellent materials one encounters on a
working farm. In the poem’s final lines, though, she again comments
admiringly on the leveling power of organic waste, for the transfig-
ured compost produces “Dirt fit / for the gardens of commoner
and king.”
Though she is referring to Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump,”
Voros could have Kumin’s compost pile in mind when she writes that
“the dump disposes of hierarchy, among other things, even to the
extent of including nature’s waste along with that of human, cultural
waste” (163). Not only combining the natural and artificial, a dump
is fundamentally nonhierarchical in mingling the rubbish of rich and
poor, mixing the castoff products of high and low culture. Elizabeth
Royte calls it “the democracy of the dump” (152), while Heather
Rogers writes that in a landfill

natural substances rot next to art images on discarded

plastic packaging; objects of superb design—the spent
lightbulb or battery—lie among sanitary napkins and
rancid meat scraps. Rubbish is also a border separating
the clean and useful from the unclean and dangerous
[. . . ]. Through waste we can read the logic of industrial
society’s relationship to nature and human labor. Here
it is, all at once, all mixed together: work, nature, land,
production, consumption, the past and future. (3)

Similarly, Kumin’s compost pile works outside the realm of industrial

society and its patterns of production and consumption. Rather than
being mummified in an anaerobic landfill, our waste products “come
slowly back to improve us,” and Kumin thus re-imagines the human
relationship to the waste we create. “Compost is our future,” she
declares, advocating the environmentally sound position that such
natural forms of recycling should become part of an improved future
relationship between people and the environment (36). Kumin’s
declaration also hints at our individual futures as compost, when, as
Whitman noted, our decaying bodies will produce nutrients for non-
human organisms.
A variation on the idea that trash represents human culture
appears in Pattiann Rogers’s “Gehenna.” In earlier poems such as

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 The American Garbage Poem 49

“Geocentric,” (Song 339), Rogers celebrated processes of decay and

composting in ways that recall Kumin’s “The Brown Mountain.”
“Gehenna,” however, puts less emphasis on ecological systems and
instead protests wastefulness and unnecessary consumption.
Gehenna, translated as hell in the Old and New Testaments, was a
valley near Jerusalem where ritual fire sacrifices took place and
which lent its name to the symbolic pit of fire and torment. “Throw
them into the pit, dump / them all in, the sacks of bones / and
baskets of ashes,” the poem begins (Generations 93). But Rogers’s
Gehenna is not a place of torment, just junk. The poem lists various
bits of trash one might find in any town landfill, including a few pol-
lutants (leaking batteries and oily rags), but mostly items that rep-
resent the usual detritus of human life: discarded furniture and
kitchenware, car parts, tools, broken dolls and umbrellas. As Rogers
presents it, this assortment of artifacts is objectionable not because of
its toxicity or physical repugnance, but because of its noise:

There they go catapulting

and crashing down, a continuous
clattering racket thundering
dust and reeking smoke of tar,
one odd ping of a piano string,
a few brief flames spitting
and hissing, the entire roaring
mischief falling away, down,
dimming, deeper, farther. (93 – 94)

Rogers sees the garbage burn pit as a site of purifying fire that will
consume the noise of materialism and dispose of the vast collection
of stuff that hinders people from appreciating the vision of sacred
nature that appears often in her poetry. As a leading environmental
poet, Rogers is unlikely to advocate suddenly dumping all of our
possessions into a landfill for burning; rather, she questions our
obsession with the consumer goods we so easily toss away.16 Her
Gehenna, therefore, represents a cleansing of the slate, an escape
from the psychological dissonance produced by too great a concern
for the physical objects with which we surround ourselves. Rejecting
the cluttering debris of daily life, we are left with sacred silence:

A hollow of quiet begins to rise

as the clanking tumult vanishes
into the depths, beyond sight,
beyond sound, maybe beyond
the moon beyond the planets,

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 50 I S L E

maybe beyond motion itself,

past the midway to everything else.
And I know for certain
salvation exists. Beautiful,
blessed pit. (94)

The restorative, salvific function of the pit recalls the mindful stillness
of meditation, as well as the language of the Judeo-Christian tra-
dition. What lies beyond the moon and planets? God or heaven would
have once been the expected answers, though Rogers does not carry
the metaphor so far into sectarian terminology. She does, however,
bring together hellish fire and heavenly silence in the liminal space of
the “blessed pit.” Though “Gehenna” is less overtly environmental
than some garbage poems, its depiction of a path from destruction to
redemptive silence is analogous to the ecological patterns of decay
and growth portrayed by other poets.
While garbage poetry reflects certain issues unique to contempor-
ary culture, it also occupies a complex place in the history of environ-
mental poetry, simultaneously reinscribing and diverging from older
traditions. It is antipastoral in basic ways, depicting repugnant
subject matter rather than the idealized natural world common in the
pastoral and Romantic traditions. At the same time, though, finding
meaning in garbage requires a departure from the usual sites of
human activity and a willingness to enter the ambiguous space of the
dumping ground or the littered field. The retreat to a waste place
distant from society often evokes a reevaluation of human culture,
and this pattern of retreat and critique has been a defining feature of
pastoralism from Classical times onward. The motif appears regu-
larly in the work of American environmental writers from Thoreau to
Wendell Berry.17 Similarly, the non-Romantic subject matter of the
garbage poem often leads to reverence for natural cycles, contempla-
tion of the relationship between the human self and the natural
world, and other patterns of thought associated with Romanticism.
In short, these garbage poems display a kind of neo-Romantic
anti-Romanticism, expressing a sense of transcendent awe through
repugnant images that depart from those of conventional
Romanticism.18
Despite the irony inherent in seeking the sacred in garbage
dumps, these poems are, in a sense, close cousins to nineteenth-
century meditations on the religious or moral significance of natural
objects. In that generation of American nature poetry, hidden wild-
flowers could suggest that there is beauty in humility, or the forest, as
“God’s first temple” in William Cullen Bryant’s phrase, could remind

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 The American Garbage Poem 51

the reader of God’s majesty as Creator. In the contemporary garbage

poem, orthodox veneration for divine creation typically gives way to
a vaguely spiritual respect for ecological cycles, but there is a great
deal of continuity in the way poets experience reverent awe at the
sight of nature. Sympathetic attention to lowly or repugnant aspects
of the natural world has become one way through which poets have
reformulated old tropes of nature as a signifier of spiritual truths.
Garbage poetry also shares a kinship with concepts of the sublime
developed by aestheticians, artists, and writers in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. In that era, the word sublime connoted
a set of specific psychological responses to the natural world,
responses evident in several garbage poems. Eighteenth-century the-
ories of the sublime suggested that people take pleasure in natural
scenes that strike them as majestic but dangerous, thus mingling
admiration with fear. Both the beautiful and sublime are pleasing to
the eye and mind, but the beautiful involves a milder, restful contem-
plation, while the sublime was considered to be harsher, involving
pleasure mixed with terror or dread. Immanuel Kant associated the
sublime with danger, vastness, and a perturbation of the mind in
which one is both attracted and repelled by the experience. Edmund
Burke similarly found sublime qualities in darkness, confusion, infin-
ity, and magnificence. As Killingsworth (19–22) and others have
noted, this welcome though frightening sense of being overwhelmed
by one’s experience is evident in Whitman’s “This Compost,” where
the combination of fearful awe and exhilarating joy recalls the classic
descriptions articulated by Kant and Burke. In Whitman’s case,
though, the trigger for the sublime experience is a dynamic though
decidedly revolting ecological process rather than a static image of a
mountain precipice or some other traditionally sublime scene. In
today’s garbage poems, sublime qualities continue to appear: in the
confused mixture of materials in dumps and compost piles, in
Roethke’s experience of eternity via the waste place of the far field, and
in the sheer physical vastness of the I-95 landfill Ammons observed.
To experience the sublime or to contemplate spiritual mysteries in
a garbage dump is to downplay one’s knowledge of the day-to-day
problems of waste management and environmental degradation.
Such concerns are mostly acknowledged only in passing by the poets
I discuss, and little attention is given to the burden of garbage as
experienced by those who must live with it on a daily basis. There is
intellectual and aesthetic pleasure in finding beauty in trash, but we
should also acknowledge the limitations of the almost utopian view
of garbage portrayed in these poems. Ammons, for example,
addresses the environmental and social problems created by trash,

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 52 I S L E

but nonetheless suggests that toxic garbage might create a global

community united by the need for international problem-solving:
toxic waste, poison air, beach goo, eroded
roads draw nations together, whereas magnanimous
platitude and sweet semblance ease each nation
back into its comfort or despair: global crises
promote internationalist gettings-together. (Garbage 24)
The environmental justice movement has drawn attention to the
social dimensions of environmental problems, but most garbage
poems say little about the unavoidable repugnance of garbage in or
near one’s home. We should remember that a certain socio-economic
privilege is inherent in thinking of garbage in aesthetic and spiritual
terms, and poems of sublime garbage form a counterpoint to the way
garbage is experienced, for example, by the urban poor in
Gwendolyn Brooks’s “kitchenette building,” which asks whether the
dreams of the lower classes can compete with the smell of fried food
and “yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall” (20).
Rather than functioning as a mode of environmental protest, the
typical American garbage poem is more in line with the
Transcendentalists’ willingness to recognize beauty in lowly nature.
We have seen Whitman’s take on the decay of the human body, and
Emerson, in the “Beauty” section of Nature, declares that “[e]ven the
corpse has its own beauty,” suggesting that beauty is a matter of atti-
tude rather than an intrinsic quality of the object perceived (Essays
28– 29). An appreciation for the less attractive aspects of the natural
world was fueled partly by a belief in the spiritual interconnection of
all matter, a view familiar from such influential texts as Alexander
von Humboldt’s Kosmos. Equally important was the increasing
knowledge of the natural world fostered by various scientific devel-
opments. In “This Compost,” for example, Whitman was directly
influenced by the work of the German chemist Justus Liebing.19
Emerson, for his part, was acutely interested in the relationship
between science and the perception of beauty. In an early lecture
inspired by his visit to the Paris natural history museums, he first
argues that science arises in response to nature’s beautiful and pictur-
esque qualities, then suggests that science also has the potential to
modify our sense of the beautiful. The expert knowledge of the com-
parative anatomist, for example, allows the observer to appreciate an
organism’s functions and place in the world. Such knowledge

takes away the sense of deformity from all objects; for,

every thing is a monster till we know what it is for [ . . . ]

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 The American Garbage Poem 53

So there is not an object in nature so mean or loathsome,

not a weed, not a toad, not an earwig, but knowledge of
its habits would lessen our disgust, and convert it
into an object of some worth; perhaps of admiration.
(“The Uses of Natural History,” Early Lectures I, 17)

The theme is continued in “Humanity of Science,” in which Emerson

states that there is “nothing in nature disagreeable, which science
does not bereave of its offence. Anatomy and Chemistry awake an
absorbing interest in processes and sights the most tedious and
revolting to the ignorant” (Early Lectures II 33).20
That scientific knowledge influences one’s reaction to seemingly
unappealing material is evident in twentieth-century garbage poems,
briefly in Kumin’s reference to “rabbit pellets, holy with nitrogen”
and more thoroughly throughout Ammons’s oeuvre, including
Garbage. Ammons declares that work to be “a scientific poem” (20)
and, like Kumin, emphasizes the ecological transformation of matter.
Food scraps fed to animals, he writes, will be

ground fine

in gizzards or taken underground by beetles and

ants: this will be transmuted into the filigree

of ant feelers’ energy vaporizations: chunk and

smear, grease and glob will boil refined in

time’s and guts’ alembics, the air carbonized

rich, potash in lacy leavings’ milding terrain. (85)

Here, the scientific terminology is both metaphorical and literal. In

Ammons’s double metaphor, both the gut and time are simultaneously
compared to a scientific instrument (the alembic), but it is in the gut
and through the passage of time that real transformations of matter
take place. There is a scientific spirit evident not only in the physical
processes themselves, but in the detail of observation Ammons
employs while explaining how garbage is recycled into ants’ antennae.
The correlation between scientific knowledge and the appreciation of
unattractive subject matter is also evident in the work of Gary Snyder,
who has advocated a “New Nature Poetics” that will “fear not
science,” and will thereby acknowledge that life “is not just diurnal
and a property of large interesting vertebrates, it is also nocturnal,
anaerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, fermentative.”21

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 54 I S L E

As Voros suggests, garbage in these poems functions similarly to

the way wilderness functioned for poets and painters of the nine-
teenth century and earlier, eliciting a wide variety of emotional and
artistic responses, ranging from fear, repugnance, and a sense of
danger, to awe, spiritual awakening, and a desire to investigate unex-
plored territory. In the United States today, natural wilderness is con-
tinually threatened by human encroachment, and it is an ironic
commentary on our era that a dump filled with our own garbage
might serve as the last refuge available to those seeking a contempla-
tive experience apart from society. For poets imaginatively entering
our culture’s waste places, the dump becomes a quasi-mystical terri-
tory in which the poet can enact a fantasy of regeneration, expressing
hope that nature’s sacred processes of ecological renewal can over-
come the physical reality of the garbage that is a fact of life in
modern culture: a hope that nature has the power to redeem even
our grossest examples of wastefulness and neglect.
However resonant it may be for contemporary poets, the retreat to
marginal waste places is part of a broader pattern of interest in such
territories. In her evocative essay “Poetry and Its Rubble,” the poet
Marianne Boruch associates poems such as Roethke’s “The Far Field”
and Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump” with a long-term historical
fascination with decay and ruin, an aesthetic that encompasses not
only certain specimens of American poetry, but the fad for graveyard
poems and estates with wild gardens and faux ruins in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century England.22 Boruch writes that “Watching
things go to rubble, and by such attention, honoring stray bits and
leavings—perhaps has always been the major cottage industry for
poetry, that first recycler” (37). To witness the process of decay—“a
thing on its way to something else”—is, Boruch adds, “an experience
as banal as it is miraculous” (37). By investigating the borderland
between the natural and artificial, between the material and the spiri-
tual, the American garbage poem honors the leavings of both human
culture and the natural world. In the contemplative space of the
dump, the compost pile, or the deserted waste place, we may find
that which repels us, but also what we value most: an ongoing
struggle to understand the complex physical and spiritual relation-
ships between the self, human society, and the world we inhabit.

NOTES

1. Elizabeth Royte suggests that pack rats, with their urine-varnished col-
lections of natural and manmade waste, come closer than any other animal to
creating human-style garbage dumps (Garbage Land 240).

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 The American Garbage Poem 55

2. Several of these texts focus extensively on waste management in

New York City, which is also the subject of Benjamin Miller’s Fat of the Land:
The Garbage of New York—The Last Two Hundred Years. In Chasing Dirt: The
American Pursuit of Cleanliness, Suellen Hoy examines the history of sanitation
and waste disposal in relation to broader issues of dirtiness, cleanliness, and
national identity. In On Garbage, meanwhile, John Scanlan (chair of a
University of St. Andrews conference on Modernity & Waste) offers a wide-
ranging analysis of garbage as metaphor, philosophical and aesthetic
concept, and physical substance.
3. Cultural analyses of garbage cited in works on Ammons include Rathje
and Murphy, Rubbish!; Blumberg and Gottlieb, War on Waste; and Charlene
Cerny and Suzanne Seriff (eds.), Recycled Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global
Scrap Heap.
4. Whitman’s works are cited by line number. Citations of other poets
refer to page numbers.
5. Julia Kristeva has associated the corpse—as well as materials such as
blood, pus, and excrement—with the abject, which she identifies as that
which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, pos-
itions, rules” (4). She explains that “These body fluids, this defilement, this
shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.
There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being” (3). Both religion
and art, she argues, have functioned as means through which human culture
attempts to purify the abject (17). “This Compost” illustrates the way literary
art can enact this process of purification. Importantly, though, Whitman
emphasizes (in a way Kristeva does not) the fact that nature carries out such
purification through continual transformative processes that art can only
imitate. Whereas Kristeva identifies repugnant substances with “defilement”
and a sense of disjunction between the self and the natural world, Whitman
views the corpse more optimistically as an emblem of posthumous unity
with the physical world.
6. For further discussion of “This Compost” in an ecological context, see
Killingsworth 19 –24, 82–84, and throughout; and Paul Outka’s
“(De)Composing Whitman.”
7. As Frederick Buell argues, Ammons, in Garbage, both absorbs and
resists postmodernism (234), creating a landscape that is “post-
environmentalist, post-pastoral, [and] post-humanist” while he at the same
time “rehabilitates the rhetoric of natural supernaturalism, the romantic
language of freshness, vision, regeneration, and celebration” (233).
8. Several writers and critics have drawn a parallel between the act of
writing and natural processes of decay. John Elder, for example, draws on
metaphors of decay, fermentation, composting, and a “bacteriological sense
of culture” to argue that twentieth-century ecopoetry is marked by a desire
to break down culture into fragments that make regeneration possible
(Elder 30). Quoting Gary Snyder’s claim that “Poets are [ . . . ] like mush-
rooms or fungus [able to] digest the symbol-detritus,” Elder argues that
“human beings may be nourished by tapping the nutrients of the past”
(Elder 31).

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9. Tim Armstrong has read The Waste Land as an ambivalent commentary

on the whole concept of waste in modern society, tracing Eliot’s references to
natural and artificial waste, citing Ezra Pound’s hygienic removal of “waste”
passages from Eliot’s manuscript, and arguing that the poem offers a general
critique of capitalist wastefulness, especially in the form of the “waste paper”
of bad writing and the daily newspapers (68– 74). On “This Compost” in
relation to Ammons’s Garbage, see Voros 163 –66 and Spiegelman 59.
10. Nemerov’s image of antique-hunters picking through trash brings to
mind another point about the marginal character as garbage: not only does it
exist on the border between culture and wild nature, it also occupies an
ambiguous legal status related to issues of ownership and privacy. No less an
institution than the United States Supreme Court has ruled that
Constitutional privacy rights do not extend to citizens’ garbage once it is
placed at curbside, though state laws vary. See Royte (35) and Strasser (7n).
11. Residential trash also plays a role in Robert Hass’s multi-part poem
“In Weather” (Field Guide 60). Animals who tear open garbage bags and
scatter food waste and packaging across a suburban lawn are the subject of
the poem’s second section, in which Hass complains about the nuisance, but
admits that it “seems a small thing / to share what I don’t want.” The poem
ends on the kind of transcendent note common in other garbage poems.
Appearing during a winter thaw, a rotting lobster claw discarded after a
meal transports the poet’s mind back to nature and away from the unsavory
experience of picking up rubbish. The scent of the claw prompts his thoughts
to travel “as if across great distances” to perceive “a faint rank fragrance of
the sea.”
12. John Scanlan explains “the creation of garbage is the result of
separation—of the desirable from the unwanted; the valuable from the
worthless, and indeed, the worthy or cultured from the cheap or meaning-
less” (15). Garbage poems, however, often show an integrative process
whereby discarded material is reclaimed by nature or returned to the realm
of civilization. This happens in a literal way for Nemerov’s antique-hunters
and for the buried junk in Wilbur’s poem. However, the use of garbage for
aesthetic purposes represents an analogous act of recovery. In Rubbish Theory:
The Creation and Destruction of Value, British social scientist Michael
Thompson writes that “the boundary between rubbish and nonrubbish is not
fixed but moves in response to social pressures” (12). Thompson’s formu-
lation offers one way of conceptualizing garbage poetry in which waste and
waste places are redefined as useful for their contemplative value and
re-envisioned as having a kind of beauty or magnificence.
13. It is to the Garbage Project that we owe the knowledge that American
landfills contain hotdogs still recognizable and newspapers still legible
decades after dumping (Rathje and Murphy 111–14). The Garbage Project
was established in 1972, years after the appearance of the early garbage
poems by Nemerov, Wilbur, and Duncan.
14. This sense of unity is evident in Roethke’s description of his first
manic episode: “I knew how to enter into the life of everything around me. I
knew how it felt to be a tree, a blade of grass, even a rabbit” (qtd. in Seager

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 The American Garbage Poem 57

101). This experience should not be dismissed as a delusion brought on

solely by mental illness, for Roethke felt an uncommon fellowship with
nature throughout his life, and is likely that the manic episode merely intensi-
fied a deep affinity for nonhuman life that Roethke had felt since childhood.
15. In an insightful Master’s thesis on the “compost metaphor” in
Kumin’s work, Mary Louise Penaz has traced numerous references to excre-
ment, compost, and other images of natural transformation appearing in
poems from throughout Kumin’s career, a pattern Penaz situates in relation
to Thoreau’s unsentimental depictions of nature.
16. The work of the cultural historians is again relevant here. Strasser, for
example, explains that the “celebration of trashmaking” increased markedly
after World War II with the increasing availability of disposable products and
the invention of so-called “planned obsolescence,” a concept touted by
business and industry magazines as a valuable marketing strategy (266–78).
17. On retreat as a motif in American eco-literature, see Randall Roorda,
Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing.
18. This is not to say that an appreciation for unattractive nature is
entirely absent from nineteenth-century Romantic poetry. The Ancient
Mariner’s praise of the seemingly repugnant water snakes is one famous
example.
19. On Whitman and science, see Joseph Beaver, Walt Whitman: Poet of
Science and David S. Reynolds’s chapter “Earth, Body, Soul: Science and
Religion” in Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (235–78).
Although figures such as Emerson and Thoreau expressed an appreciation
for nature’s less-attractive processes and entities, these views tended to be
expressed in their essays rather than in their relatively conventional poetry.
Few poets aside from Whitman (and occasionally Dickinson) incorporated
images of unattractive nature into their work during the nineteenth century,
when the traditional association between poetry and natural beauty remained
strong and when images of picturesque and majestic nature dominated both
poetry and landscape painting.
20. On Emerson and science, see Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum:
Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole; William Rossi, “Emerson,
Nature, and Natural Science”; Laura Dassow Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science:
The Culture of Truth; and Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science.
21. Originally in The Practice of the Wild, 110 –11. Quoted in “Unnatural
Writing,” The Gary Snyder Reader, 261 –62.
22. As several scholars have noted, images of trash and urban decay are
also common in recent science fiction and in postapocalyptic novels and
films. Several such works are discussed in “The Perfume of Garbage:
Modernity and the Archaeological” (73 –78) by Michael Shanks, David Platt,
and William Rathje. These authors point to depictions of trash and futuristic
ruins in sources ranging from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, through contem-
porary novels such as Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Russell Hoban’s Riddley
Walker, to films such as Planet of the Apes and Star Wars. Shanks, Platt, and
Rathje note that several of these stories involve a character’s “journey into
the ruins of our world to discover a truth,” a motif shared by many

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garbage poems (74). On the other hand, the sense of spiritual and ecological
renewal seen in garbage poems is less common in these examples of fiction
and film.

WORKS CITED

Ammons, A. R. Garbage. New York: Norton, 1993.

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Beaver, Joseph. Walt Whitman: Poet of Science. Morningside Heights, NY:
King’s Crown, 1951.
Blumberg, Louis, and Gottlieb Robert. War on Waste: Can America Win Its
Battle With Garbage? Washington, DC: Island, 1989.
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