But there’s plenty more that could be said about Ultimatum, much of which veers into the sociopolitical and, given its subject matter, remains relevant today (I’m thinking here of the prospect of nuclear war that a power-mad despot is currently threatening Ukraine with, but there’s wider application of course, e.g. to issues of climate change and environmental degradation, beyond the fact of the stunning experience of reading Church’s poetry as an aesthetic undertaking). Without duplicating what I’ve written in my forthcoming article, I will say that there I analyze poems in her first two collections through the lens of what Timothy Morton has termed “dark ecology” (with a nod to the scholar Sarah Daw, who has analyzed Church’s letters and diaries in this manner before me). Far from whatever stereotypes we may have about “nature poetry,” I argue that Church’s poetry of the 1930s is much closer to what we would think of today as ecocritical and material-feminist.
During the Second World War, until early 1943, Church lived at the Los Alamos school (in New Mexico) where her husband was the principal; they were dispossessed of their home to make way for the Manhattan Project, which commandeered the site in order to build the atomic bomb. Church reacted with scathing poems in Ultimatum for Man, such as the collection’s title poem, along with “The Nuclear Physicists,” “Epitaph for Man,” “Newsreel: Dead Enemy,” “For a Son in High School A.D. 1940,” “Lines Written after a Political Argument,” “Comment on a Troubled Era,” and “Jeremiad” (from the latter: “This fury called man, / this fungus / gnawing the polished and hemispheric surface / of our bright earth…”). In the introduction to Church’s New and Selected Poems (1976), T. M. Pearce characterizes Ultimatum as a “turn for Mrs. Church, a turn not away from the landscape line, but an adjustment to a new point of view in which the poet sees individuals as units in a social group” (iii), while Shelley Armitage writes in the introduction to Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church (2001), “Whereas the lyrical Foretaste and Familiar Journey address a woman’s attempt to balance relationships, her own creative and independent personality, and her desire to develop spiritual bonds with nature, Ultimatum for Man sharply links the personal and creative quests to the meaning of the atomic age, war, and human responsibility” (6). The furor and anger with which Church imbues many of these poems is striking, and she does so in ways that are not merely jeremiadic, but as powerful poems that now more than ever should be revisited.
I’ll look quickly at a couple of the poems in this collection (which incidentally was a really nice, offset-printed, stapled, chapbook-style volume with french fold covers and Native-inspired graphics included throughout, published by James Ladd Delkin in 1946, with a second edition in 1947). Coming on the heels of two poems about the destruction of civilizations (“Omens” and “Sic Transit Gloria”), “Epitaph for Man” (pp. 18-19) imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario in which extra-terrestrials arrive on earth (“beach themselves upon our ruined sphere”), only to discover that the human beings who wreaked the “havoc of these days, / the blackened girder, the distorted steel” have destroyed themselves in the process. Where in the previous two poems Church’s human speaker wanders in the ruins of history, here, in a sort of sci-fi twist, the alien visitors find it “Strange, they shall say, / the race that wrought such things should pass away” while there still exist the “beautiful and brimming skies.” Clearly the evidence of human history, however, as limned in the preceding “Omens” and “Sic Transit Gloria,” predict the nuclear destruction that Church at this point feels is almost an inevitability. The poem ends with a pathetic vision of some kind of post-human survival, as the visitors investigate further:
we sometimes heard a furtive, creeping sound,
and hairless things that gave strange human cries
stared at us with blind, vestigial eyes.
It is noteworthy that the earth remains “bounteous and verdant,” while humanity, such as it is, has become wretched and “blind,” for Church’s strongest allegiance lay with the earth itself. The poem is perhaps then even a kind of wish fulfillment where human beings (who again in “Jeremiad” Church called a “fungus” on the surface of the planet) learn their lesson the hard way, while the environment is able to renew itself and continue on.
The anger caused by the trauma of losing her home to the builders of the bomb clearly permeates the collection. Even before the advent of the nuclear age, however, Church’s poetry wrestled with Western, Cartesian conceptions of the natural world and the alienation she felt from it even as she desired connection with it (the subject of my forthcoming article) — and this was only heightened by the events of World War Two and increasing technological “advancement.” Armitage writes that Church “attempted to penetrate the Western skein of consciousness about place as the ‘other,’ which she believed was dramatized dangerously in the atomic, scientific, and modern projects connected also to constructs of the feminine” (“Shared and Shifting Land[scapes]” 113).The kind of environmental writing Church elaborated in her first two collections is present in Ultimatum for Man, as well, and provides an alternative vision to that of the death-dealing scientists. “Little Sermon in Stone” (pp. 26-27) describes a “we” lying down upon New Mexico rock and “hushing our man-proud thought” (as if in apophatic meditation), gazing at the stone that is now eye level. In this state of transformed consciousness, Church (and the other person, unnamed) synesthetically apprehend the things of the world themselves as transformed:
We saw the crystalline flowering of the stone,
the many-faceted complexity,
the light turned back with orchestrated beat
into our listening eyes, the blood-stained reds,
the flush of yellow and the dove-dark greens.
In a 1934 review of Church’s first collection, Foretaste, A.J.M. Smith wrote in Poetry magazine that her work has “the precision and freshness of imagery that once made Amy Lowell’s poems exciting,” that at times Church’s poems “adhere strictly to the imagist principles,” but that at others she has, due to the organic demands of a given poem itself, “had to depart from the bare outline and stripped technique of the true imagist,” which Smith finds to be a laudable tactic (“The Sense of Place” 340-41). To bring it back to “Little Sermon in Stone” (1942/46), Church’s handling of the image becomes even more nuanced — we are seeing not necessarily the “thing itself” but the inner workings of reality in a meditative or trance state. Tuning further into the structure of light within the stones, the two companions in the poem watch the history of lichens and other plant life leave its traces on the rock:
Light became leaf,
and leaf, with who knows what of agony,
contrived its seed to float upon the wind.
The colored lichens take the world apart…
It is this transformation of light into leaf that is the energy or force of life itself. It is perhaps no coincidence that this process, as mystic as it may also be, takes place on the atomic level; thus Church seems to suggest that such changes have their positive and negative aspects, both life-giving or life-taking. Church’s reconciling of these polarities of the nuclear in her prose is the subject of Daw’s work (in her 2018 study Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature), but here we get something of these ideas from a vastly different, poetic approach.
Though there have been attempts to promote and/or recover Church’s poetry before and after her death in 1986 — a New and Selected Poems from Ahsahta Press in 1976, a Selected from Red Crane Press in 1993, and a 2011 biography by Sharon Snyder — Church is long overdue for a Complete Poems from an academic or top trade press.
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