ABSTRACT
This chapter provides Brenda Hillman’s contemporary work as a poet and activist in conversation with Henry David Thoreau’s work from the 19th century. The “swoon” of electrons also points us toward that erotic energy of the cosmos, the “procreant urge” to echo Whitman. This energy made the epic leap from the elemental to the cell possible, a leap that opened up the poiesis of the innumerable life-forms of Gaia. Like “individual letters,” individual electrons in a cell have a feeling just prior to mitosis, an idea that Brenda Hillman establishes in “Patience Swoons in the Sword Ferns”: Deep in the earth, an unprecedented seed. The gasp points, to two liminal moments: any time a seed morphs toward becoming a plant, a process in which semiosis drives forth the poiesis of form, and on Gaia, that electrons swooned in that swarm around a nucleus into the cells that eventually morphed into plants.
