This is a book about some of the ways in which Renaissance poets ended lines of poetry. Line endings have not attracted much critical attention as a whole, although there is certainly a large body of scholarship on line endings in particular poems and on some of the subjects that I shall discuss in this book. There is, for instance, substantial critical discourse on rhyme and in the paragraphs that follow this I mention both a book that focuses on how poems end and one that looks as the line as a unit. But I want to focus more attention on line endings in general, as I think they are, or can be, the defining feature of the poem. In an interview with L. S. Dembo in 1968, the poet George Oppen said that

One way to paraphrase this would be to say that line endings call attention to themselves and shape the poem for readers as they create the poem on the page. This, at least, is what line endings should do. Many line endings are unemphatic and seem completely arbitrary, but in this book, I’ll look at line endings that are noticeable and sometimes even obtrusive.

When I wrote in the first paragraph that line endings are the defining features of the poem, I meant “defining” in both its literal and metaphorical senses, as the line breaks are what create a poem. If a poem did not have line breaks but instead marched relentlessly from margin to margin, then it would just be prose. The breaks, the white spaces that follow each poetic line, allow us to recognize a poem as a poem even if we cannot make out or understand the words or even identify the language in which the text is written: the unusual amount of blank space on the right side of the page (unusual compared to prose, that is) tells us that we’re looking at a poem.

Introduction

Why did South Africa and the Kruger National Park (KNP) in particular not become a major early locus for African wildlife filmmaking? Why was the most visited and best-known African wildlife reserve, the place which probably drew more tourists than the rest of the continent’s wildlife reserves combined, not the continent’s first and most prominent locale for wildlife filming?

A first obvious point is that the KNP is in many ways a difficult place to see animals and to film them – at least compared to the savannahs of East Africa, or the waterholes of Etosha. The road network for tourists covers only a small part of the total surface of the park and limits access to most of the park. Trees block views and animals can disappear easily. For most of this period, almost all of the park was closed for the summer months because of dangers of contracting malaria. Anybody filming animals is likely to be disturbed by other tourists viewing or vying for good viewing spots. The Kruger Park also has obvious signs of human shaping: roads, rest-camps, telephone wires and fences. These too may have discouraged filmmakers looking to create an illusion of an untouched wilderness.

A neat example of the problems filmmakers faced and the ways they tried to liven up footage could be found in a French television news item aired on the 1 July 1954, with the title ‘Sans Barreaux’ or without bars. In this insert, reporter Jean Hudelot is shown entering the park at an entrance gate. Animals are photographed from the car window. A sleeping lion is roused by the reporter banging on the car to wake him up. Inserted in this is a sequence of the intrepid reporter hiding behind some bushes to view the game and then moving fast back to his car. One scrupulous editor somewhere annotated the sequence: some scenes were shot in the Bois du Boulogne! Clearly a series of shots of a rather portly reporter in a car and animals rather more distant than they would be in a zoo were not felt to be entertaining enough, and the journalist or editor in Paris decided to add drama by having the reporter out of the car.

I am sitting in a wooden chair on the partly covered porch of a cabin at the historic Miller Farm that is an extension of Bend's High Mountain Desert Museum. I am wearing a pair of wireless headphones so that I can hear pianist Hunter Noack against the backdrop of a thunderstorm. Suddenly, there is a flash of lighting and a crack of thunder. Another flash of lighting followed immediately by thunder and then an onslaught of rain. As I listen to the music through the headphones, I try to remember exactly how many seconds exist between lighting and thunder to determine the storm's closeness. I think about leaving but note that no one else is leaving, so I focus on the music and reflect on a concert in a landscape as a combination of stormy weather, the music coming through the headphones and the landscape of this nineteenth-century farm at the edge of the Cascade Range. I also consider how different the experience at the Miller Farm is from hearing Hunter Noack play on Oregon's State Capital Mall in Salem on a quiet summer evening. On that evening, I walked around and listened to the music through the headphones as I contemplated the green landscape of the mall, the rows of cherry trees and the bronze golden-leaf statue of Oregon's pioneer on top of the Capital building. Contemplating both experiences, I reflect on the communities of people across Oregon who have attended Hunter Noack's IN A LANDSCAPE concert since 2016 in such diverse places as Crater Lake, Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Columbia Gorge, Smith Rock State Park and the farm home of Oregon's legendary writer Ken Kesey. I realize my experience of the landscapes of the Miller Farm and the Capital Mall will now be firmly identified with the sounds of a piano (Figure 10 ).

Bend, Sunriver and the Cascades: From Timber to Creative City

Hunter Noack's life might be described metaphorically as taking place in a landscape of central Oregon combined with the landscape of classical music. Born in 1989, he was raised in Sunriver.

Salem, the state capital of Oregon, sits astride the Willamette River in the north-central part of the Willamette Valley with the Coast Range to the west and the Cascades to the east. The original inhabitants were the Kalapuya people who had lived in the mild climate of Willamette Valley for thousands of years as hunters and gathers who considered “humans, animals and the land as interconnected.” The yearly life of the Kalapuya moved with the seasons. In the spring, they moved across the valley floor harvesting camas and hunting migratory birds. With the heat of summer, they moved to the foothills where men hunted and women picked and preserved wild cherries, elderberries, blueberries and hazelnuts. The coolness of the fall brought on a period of burning the prairie and harvesting of acorns. The cooler temperatures of winter caused them to return to their large cedar bark and plank lodges. As Boag notes, “The Kalapuya's continuous cycle of seasonal movements among various eco-systems of the valley is one indicator of stability in the human environmental relationship.” The landscape was changed following the establishment of a Methodist mission by Jason Lee near the Kalapuyan village of Tchimikiti in 1841. Settlers followed dividing the land into plots and plowed the fields following styles of land use that they had evolved east of the Mississippi. The Kalapuya people were moved in 1855 to the Grande Ronde reservation that is still located between Salem and the coastal community of Lincoln City.

Elizabeth Lord (1887–1976) and Edith Schryver's (1901–1984) joint venture of a landscape architecture business entered into the history of Salem in 1929. Their visual aesthetic was the European influences from their training at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts. In their 40 years of practice, their design style influenced over 200 gardens throughout the Pacific Northwest. They lived and ran their business out of a house on Mission Street in an area referred to as Gaiety Hill which was then and is still today on the edge of Salem's business district.

The introduction to this volume quotes the 2011 James Irvine Foundation published report titled Getting in on the Act. It is included again as the report's observations are fundamental to the changes that have taken place in the arts throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Essentially, the Irvine report was documenting the consequence of an intense political engagement in which many visual and performing artists around the globe became committed to creating art that represented the identity and expressed the concerns of a community. In terms of theater, this activist performance form is an extension of the engaged theater of German director and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1893–1956) and the performance methods of Brazilian Augusto Boal (1931–2009), whose performances broke the fourth wall of the proscenium and encouraged the stage as a space of community dialogue. As Cohen-Cruz points out, “theater is not a self-contained entity but rather gains meaning in context, integrated into people's lives.”

This chapter traces Daniel Stone and Tinamarie Ivey's evolution of an approach to theater in Oregon's Willamette Valley that builds on the performance theories of Brecht and Boal that they refer to as “sanctuary theater” or in terms of its company name, Sanctuary Stage. Merriam Webster Dictionary notes that sanctuary is a political concept derived from the Latin sanctuarium with a history primarily associated with worship.

I hope to have shown throughout this book how important the choice of words to end lines is. The sestina form is especially interesting in this regard. In the case of blank verse or free verse, the choice of end words is almost boundless; in the case of rhyming poetry, there is typically a wide choice for each succeeding rhyme; in the case of the sestina, the choice is restricted to the first stanza. After that, the sestina moves inexorably through its various permutations. While different poets may use different patterns of repetition, the repetition is always present. Because of this, the sestina might seem to be the perfect example of how form can come to dictate content and not just to give it a shape. One objection to this idea is that the opposition of form to content is often, if not always, a false dichotomy. Here, I am thinking of a comment made by the America poet Robert Creeley: “content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content.” Creeley’s repeated “never” is rather too emphatic, but it is certainly true that when we think about any art object we should try to think about form and content together. As Kimberly Johnson has recently pointed out, “the work of art must be encountered not as a transparent window onto a narrative (content) nor as a set of denarrativized obstructions (form) but rather as a mechanism that modulates between the two.” With its highly conspicuous form, a form that is further emphasized in the relatively rare rhyming version that is one of my concerns in this chapter, a really successful sestina is especially well equipped to give us the opportunity to consider form and content in close relation.

It has to be admitted that there are more failed sestinas than successful ones, however. Far too many sestinas show signs of the poet’s straining to work within the set form. By contrast, in a successful sestina the poet works the content and the form together: the extent to which the form threatens to overwhelm the content can become the content.

Klamath Falls, Oregon-based environmental writer Emma Marris suggests there is a tendency for Oregonians to mythologize Oregon as having retained its nineteenth-century designation as the Land of Eden. She argues, “We must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.” As she notes, the romantic view does not take into account our impact on the planet. Ecologist Erle Ellis further describes our impact,

A corresponding view is held by visual artist Monte Shelton’s Key Element (Figure 23). Influenced by growing up visiting Oregon's diverse landscapes, during summer family adventures, Shelton comments on Oregon's current state through the iconic skeleton key, a symbol of opening. In this case, the opening is the influence of humans in the Anthropocene. Painted during the forest fires that swept Oregon in September of 2020, Shelton explains the painting's symbolism,

When reaching the implementation stage, nuclear decisions are submitted to regulation dynamics. Pre-Brexit, the specific situation of the UK as both a multinational state and a member of the European Union complexified policy implementation. Although national in structure, nuclear power transcends geographical boundaries, as nuclear activities are constrained by both direct and indirect regulation. Direct regulation covers nuclear activities management, while indirect regulation, which has expanded over the past thirty years, is primarily linked to climate change mitigation imperatives. Besides, today's domestic nuclear regulation is mostly impacted by international agreements and arrangements blending soft and rigid legal frameworks. ‘Soft regulation’ involves all forms of non-binding norms; on the other hand, decisions such as domestic regulations and European directives for fall into the hard rules category since they have normative and binding legal force. In that sense, the UK state finds itself grappling with an international system of checks and balances, dealing with supranational authorities overseeing these regulatory frameworks which cannot but alter the very nature of domestic regulatory decisions. UK nuclear policy stands de facto within the several interlocking frameworks of target-setting and regulation at both the supranational and subnational levels.

Beside technical regulation on safety and security matters, UK nuclear activities have come to be symbiotically intertwined with environmental and climate policies, especially since the turn of the 2000s, as encapsulated in the British Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) established in 2008 and dissolved in the 2016 ministerial reshuff le. Tony Blair's second and third terms in particular saw these two global matters converge and become a prime focus of attention on New Labour's agenda. From 2004, the Blair governments more actively engaged with environmental policies, after a first tenure devoted to constitutional, health and education reforms. Blair strove to position the UK as a world leader in the global fight against climate change. To that end, Blair sought to boost relations between the UK and other supranational authorities involved in climate change mitigation, including the UN or the EU.

Articulating nuclear matters with globalisation or Europeanisation dynamics has raised a lot of concerns regarding an alleged weakening of national sovereignty as well of state authority and capacity. In 1989, political scientist David Held had already warned against:

Introduction

Carol Hughes, eventually perhaps habituated enough to trust me with a major revelation, one day said her husband David’s mantra was: ‘Not the BBC’. Why, given some of his most important films were made for them and that he had in part been trained by them, and given the general esteem in which the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU) and David Attenborough are held, might he have seen them as a negative principle? To understand the distinctive strengths of Southern African wildlife documentaries, it is useful to extract some of the NHU’s key operating principles as they were at once the source of its distinctive achievements but also point to some of their weaknesses and to the niches in the wildlife ecosphere the Southern Africans tried to fill.

The NHU

The histories of the BBC’s Natural History Unit examined earlier (Bright, Davies, Gouyon, Louson) illustrate the strengths of this institution but also suggest its corollary weaknesses. As I argued earlier, the weakness of the accounts of the NHU is both theoretical and historical in that they try to extract the NHU from the larger competitive broadcasting and production contexts. To try to write the history of the NHU without looking at what other broadcasters were doing or who was winning the ratings wars or industry accolades is to miss the way in which the field (to invoke Bourdieu) was developing and changing.

Let us put aside the greater home audience for most US productions and note that for much of the past half century, the NHU was not even the dominant wildlife broadcaster in the UK. Survival, with a strong component of Southern African material and with a South African born producer Mike Hay, was drawing much larger audiences (Gouyon 2019, 116). Partridge, as Davies pointed out, won the big competition prizes for most of the 1980s. And it didn’t stop there. Ellen Windemuth recalls in 2000 walking to collect the Golden Panda for the Foster brothers’ The Great Dance past rows of shocked BBC figures. If that didn’t happen in 2020 when Craig Foster won for My Octopus Teacher it was only because the event that year was virtual because of the COVID pandemic.