The gardens beyond are to be seen through the thin and gaping walls of the streets, and there, overturned and defaced by shell-bursts and the crude subsoil thrown out from dug-outs, a few ragged shrubs survive. A rustic bower is lumbered with empty bottles, meat tins, a bird-cage, and ugly litter and fragments.… It is perplexing to find how little remains of the common things of the household; a broken doll, a child’s boot, a trampled bonnet. Once in such a town I found a corn-chandler’s ledger.…
I don’t know that I ever read a book with more interest than that corn-chandler’s ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a commonplace record of the common life which circulated there, testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have been no matter to me.
Tomlinson even gives a wartime inflection to lumber in his preface: “My friend added his own gas-mask and apparatus to the grim lumber on the hat-rack. The floor was wet, and was cumbered with heavy boots, guns, and dirty haversacks.”
Back to cheerfuller Garbage-heaps, though. Charles Ira Bushnell published Crumbs for Antiquarians, a book of revolutionary war studies, in 1864–66; and the Reverend Elnathan Corrigton Gavitt came up with the fine title Crumbs from My Saddle Bags for a book of pioneer reminiscences published in 1884. About then T. De Witt Talmage tried the simpler Crumbs Swept Up. Dylan Thomas published “The Crumbs of One Man’s Year” in The Listener in 1947. Nathaniel Parker Willis offered The Rag-Bag, a Collection of Ephemera (1855); Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes produced an anthology called The Rattle Bag in 1982. There is Waste Basket, Husks of Wheat, Dump Truck, Debris, Sewage, Bin Ends, Stubble Burning, Stubble Poems, Dirty Washing, The Waste Land, Out of the Bog, Bog Poems, and Disgust, which are books of poetry by Charles Bukowski, Diane Wakoski, Keith Abbott, Madge Morris, Valerie Hannah Weisberg, Victoria Rothschild, Roland Gant, Willie, Sylvia Kantaris, T. S. Eliot, Harold Strong Gulliver, Seamus Heaney, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, respectively. Layton Irving is the author of Droppings from Heaven (1979); Thomas MacKellar in 1844 wrote a book of occasional poetry called Droppings from the Heart; and the poet Duncan McNaughton titled one of his books Shit on My Shoes (1979). There is even a Poop, and Other Poems (1972) by Gerald Locklin. Douglas Houston produced With the Offal Eaters: Poems in 1986, and Ordinary Madness Press published Doug Hornig’s Feeding at the Offal Trough: Poems in 1983.
Ammons, performing a subject search in an online catalog for “Garbage Disposal,” was (so he tells us in Garbage, p. 49) pleased to retrieve nothing, since it gave him a “clear space and pure / freedom to dump whatever.” Ammons’s online catalog (presumably it is Cornell’s) has more clear spaces than mine: on the day I devoted to this offal search (December 1, 1994), I found several books by typing FIND SUBJECT GARBAGE DISPOSAL: one was a Combustible Refuse Collection Survey performed in Cleveland, circa 1940, by the WPA. But I found no books of poetry or collected prose entitled Sullage, or Dregs, or Rinsings, or Squeezings, or Medical Waste, or Filth-Inhabiting Flies, or Draff, or Vetch—and I hereby reserve the right (nonexclusive, of course) to use any or all of these, alone or in combination, for future books. Most surprisingly, there is no book of poetry or gathering of fugitive review-essays called simply Lumber. Lumber and Other Essays: one can imagine some minor turn-of-the-centurion like Augustine Birrell or Edmund Gosse or W. E. Henley5 settling on it as a title, but as it happens, none of them quite saw their way to it. There is, however, an ahead-of-its-time book by one Selina Gaye called The World’s Lumber Room (1885) that A. R. Ammons would probably like. Its epigraph is a slightly emended quotation from Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield:
I regarded myself as one of those vile things that Nature designed should be thrown by into her
lumber room
, there to perish in obscurity.
Selina Gaye (also the author of The Maiden of the Iceberg: A Tale in Verse, published in 1867 and not included in the English Poetry Database, though it is available on microfilm) has left out an adjective: Goldsmith’s sentence actually reads (I flipped through the Vicar three times before I found it), “… there to perish in unpitied obscurity.” The World’s Lumber Room is an interdisciplinary study of “dust” and its sources and users — it occupies itself with decomposition, the recycling of Victorian household refuse, the social hierarchy of Parisian ragpickers (or chiffonniers), kitchen middeners, ants, flies, coral reefs, volcanoes, beetles, the medicinal jelly made from ivory dust, brewers’ refuse (“draff”) pressed into cakes and fed to horses, and old rugs:
A carpet which covered the floor of one of the rooms in the mint of San Francisco for five years was, when taken up, cut in small pieces, and burnt in pans, with the result that its ashes yielded gold and silver to the value of 2,500 dollars.
The following passage in particular, from Gaye’s preface, is oddly inspiring:
The World’s Lumber Room, comprising the three great departments of Earth, Air, and Water, is in fact co-extensive with the World itself, and, so far from being the sort of place which the worthy Vicar’s son seems to have pictured to himself, is rather a workshop or laboratory, where nothing is left to “perish,” in his sense of the word, but the old becomes new, and the vile and refuse, instead of being “thrown by” in their vileness, are taken in hand and turned to good account.
Perhaps I am not so very misguided, then, in deliberately making a lumber-room of my head with the present study, so long as that room is, as Gaye contends, coextensive with the world itself. No decomposing quotation is so vile that it can’t be taken in hand and turned to good account. Still, if I’m going to quote from the long and illustrious line of lumber-into-treasure commonplaceholders, if I’m going to cite Horace and Wordsworth and Emerson and W. E. Henley and Saki and A. R. Ammons, there is no excuse for my having left out of this series the most adept and amazing commonplace-transfigurer there ever was, or will be. “He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems,” Leslie Stephen writes, in an essay called “Pope as a Moralist,” but in another passage Stephen grants, as we all must, that Alexander Pope has “a probably unequalled power of coining aphorisms out of common-place.” Of Pope’s Essay on Criticism the harsh Reverend Elwin says that all the classical doctrines of criticism in it “might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning,” and he concurs with De Quincey’s dismissal of it as “mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps.” And yet what an extraordinary multiplication table it is, and what lucky sewer rats we readers are! Tiny known quantities of sense, operated upon in accordance with known metrical law, yield in Pope’s arithmetic hands infinitely long and unrepeating decimals of truth: