I Found The World So New

On Tom Comitta's "The Nature Book"

Back in college, I wrote a poem. (I know that hook probably has you screaming for the exits, but bear with me here.) It was a long found poem made up of extracts from the endnotes to a collection of Melville’s short stories; in a fit of mania I had started pulling phrases from the source, and then even more manically arranged them into a kind of epic. (It had six parts!) I got it published in one of those poky English department literary journals that are mostly the occasion for wine and cheese magazine launch soirees, and I wasn’t even in town for the party. I was quite proud of the poem¹, though, so much so that after I graduated I figured I’d try it again, maybe put together a whole chapbook of found poems cobbled together from cheap Oxford University Press World’s Classics editions. Like many of my post-graduate career gambits, this was an ill-conceived path to success; it’s hard to say whether it was more foolish to believe I could make money writing poetry, or believing that I could simply dip into a couple more sections of endnotes and magically arrange more good poems. What I learned, after much scouring and transcribing and arranging, is that I had gotten extremely lucky with that first source, and that you could not make chicken salad out of chicken shit if your source material simply didn’t have enough good phrases. The poems were always a better in theory than in practice. Found poems, arrangements, collage poems: whatever you call it, it’s a lot of fruitless work to get to something even half decent, and that’s before you get to the legions of people flatly uninterested in reading them, let alone publishing them. So you’re telling me you didn’t write any of it? Legally, can we even? Don’t you have something to say yourself, instead?

This is a long way around to say that I found Tom Comitta’s 2023 novel The Nature Book frankly astounding, a large scale project of assemblage that actually also works as a novel. Anyone can have a high concept – even and especially dumb college kids – but it takes something else to actually execute it; Comitta swings for the fences and resoundingly connects. Self-described as a ‘literary supercut,’ The Nature Book is constructed solely out of descriptions of nature from a broad selection of the English-language canon. The only small edits are some punctuation changes and some blended sentences; the language is otherwise untouched, just rearranged by Comitta into a whole new narrative. In his curatorial role, Comitta becomes an Emerson-ian all-seeing eye, a transparent record of (English) literature’s contact with the natural world. It would be interesting enough for all of us pattern-seeking humans if it were just a kind of poetic collection of repetitions and chance overlaps, but Comitta is able to form something close to a conventional novel out of these passages, with a plot, recurring characters, and a real overarching momentum all its own.

The book is split into distinct sections, each focusing on different “macropatterns” that Comitta discovered in his delve into the literary canon: the four seasons, forests and mountains, the seas, tropical islands, the heavens, plains, deserts. Certain images reappear across these patterns, with writers frequently using sunrises, sunsets, storms, and lone itinerant animals as objective correlatives for their (human) characters’ emotional states. In The Nature Book, though, these descriptors are shorn from their context, and instead make a fractured portrait of all the various meanings writers ascribe to nature’s unknowable movements. Here’s the beginning of a storm during the four seasons section:

High over the trees was spread an unvarying sombreness of vapour. The sky was the the color of television, turned to a dead channel. Clouds brooded. Nothing prospered but the wind, which chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air. It was a wild scene: The crow was circling overhead, soaring on the evening blast. The wind was howling. The male swerved and sailed. The wind dipped, struck, and rose, groaning with the effort of the chase, but the crow hurtled frenziedly through the air and wrote a fast, jagged, exuberant message with its sharp-pointed wings across the sky. The wind continued its assault, gusting and then swirling around him one moment and gone the next. Then the bird dove under the canopy of the woods, down through the trees, lost, so small amid the dark mess of leaves, the fragmented image fading down corridors of television sky.

Part of the fun in reading The Nature Book is trying to peek behind the curtain and pick out what’s from where; it’s easy enough to spot Melville (frequently in the aquatic sections), Joyce (anytime some gobbledygook words showed up I knew my man was pulling from Finnegan’s Wake) or Woolf (waves, lighthouses, you know the drill), but more difficult to find, say, where Catch-22 showed up. (The list of sources covers seven double-columned pages; that distinctive television line in the passage above comes from William Gibson’s Neuromancer.)² Amid the storms of metaphor, the barrage of description, Comitta’s roving eye picks out these solitary figures – deer, birds, horses, even a beaver – and somehow imbues them with a sense of character, following them on epic journeys across constantly shifting landscapes. Because of Comitta’s Oulipo-an constraints about sourcing and repetition, his various settings can become somewhat inconsistent, but an animal’s encounter with them – as filtered through human imagination – allows for a kind of constant, something for the pareidolic among us to hold onto. When Comitta drifts from these characters, the scale becomes cosmic, wading into the deep cyclical time of nature, its eons of death and rebirth. Here’s a passage where Comitta flexes the might of the archive while also emphasizing the endlessness (physical and temporal) of the ocean:

This mountain and its ravines could not have been any more than forty million years old, but throughout its brief life it had always been a lively infant when compare to the roarings of the giant ocean. It’s true. Millions upon millions of years ago, back to ancient times before the mountains were born, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others: water. Secretly, far beneath the visible surface, it moved slowly, coming and going at different depths. There was something ominous about it, and yet it was wonderful, an intoxication: its taste: its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its slow erosions of peninsulas and island, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its violence in seaquakes, torrents, eddies, whirlpools, maelstroms: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minces and tidal estuaries: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe.

This epic Melvillian register is a trick that Comitta uses sparingly (lest the book become overly found-poetic) but powerfully, a vast array of descriptors juxtaposed in a wall of text, a scale model of the ocean made out of attempts to encompass it in words. Even in an experimental text like this, the novelistic form allows for ebbs and flows between more straightforward plot and textured description like this; plenty of conventional authors don’t even try to muster that, which makes Comitta’s achievement all the more impressive.

The only references to the human world that Comitta included in the novel were instances when authors chose to compare the natural to the man-made, whether it’s television or a picture postcard; these little intrusions into what is otherwise an all-natural show remind the reader not only the artificiality of the text, but also the long project of destruction that humankind has inflicted on nature, so much so that it only becomes comparable to the crap we’ve replaced it with, or with idealized representations of a place that no longer exists (because of all the crap we had to put there.) The final sections of the novel impose the specter of climate destruction, the slow sloughing off of life that we’ve surely guaranteed for the planet, and these sections are even more poignant because of what’s come before, the accrued weight of every bit of flora and fauna we’ve read about leading up to the end, as well as the long human record of that nature. It’s ultimately a reminder that killing the planet kills all its chroniclers as well, that we are rushing towards a world that has “never been, like the sound a tree doesn’t make when it falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it.”

Till then, Comitta’s book is enough of a marvel to take a bit of solace in the world we’ve made, and even good enough to maybe indulge in some collegiate activities and try to write some more poems. Just imagine: it could be like Old School, but instead of joining a frat I’m writing experimental poems and listening to The Avalanches again… hey, why not, we’ve only got one Earth and one life anyway…

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You can get The Nature Book at your local bookstore or local library. Ordering online from Bookshop.org helps independent bookstores across the country.

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1. You know what? I went back and read it and I’m still proud of it. That poem rules, and somehow it was published in the one issue of The Veg (real publication name) that wasn’t uploaded online. Paid subscribers, twist my arm and I’ll post it for you.

2. The other fun part is figuring out books that should’ve been included: how did no Joy Williams make it in here? No Butcher’s Crossing? No Denis Johnson?? C’mon, there had to be a place for this from Breaking and Entering: “Rosy fingered dawn bloomed elsewhere, in higher, purer altitudes perhaps, where the heart beats more slowly.”