The Canyon: Robert Savino Oventile’s Remarkable Collection of Poems about Eaton Canyon
Editor's Note: Robert Savino Oventile's latest collection of poems, The Canyon, includes 24 works; nine of which originally appeared in MyEatonCanyon.com as Trail Magic contributions, plus six others previously published in poetry journals. The book incorporates photographs from fellow My Eaton Canyon contributors Susan Hopkins, Tom Mills and Edgar McGregor. Over lunch at Tacos Poncitlan on Allen, Oventile discussed silence, time, his appreciation of Frankenstein, the nature of nature and, of course, the art of poetry with journalist Phil Hopkins. Proceeds from sales of The Canyon will be used to fund the replacement of educational exhibits lost in the Eaton Fire at the Eaton Canyon Nature Center.[Hopkins] This is clearly not your first book of poetry.
[Oventile] It’s my fifth book overall, my second book of poetry.
[Hopkins] Tell me the origin story of this one…why write poems about one canyon and specifically why Eaton Canyon?
[Oventile] In 2022 I was down there hiking many times a week and thought it might as well become a writing project. That’s the origin of the book, more or less, on a somewhat superficial level. A bit more deeply, some of my earliest memories are connected to the canyon.
I remember visiting the original Nature Center as a child. My parents grew up during the Depression. If something was free for a family event, something to do on a weekend, they noticed, so they took my siblings and I to Eaton Canyon often. My orientation in the world has Eaton Canyon as a factor, kind of in the middle distance.
I’ve had ecological thoughts running around my mind for quite some time. The La Brea Tar Pits were another family outing — free, right? So, early on, I must have been thinking about changes in the environment. My eight-year-old self wouldn’t have put it that way, but I was exposed to thoughts of large-scale ecological change at a young age.
In 2022, I thought I would start writing a series of poems about the canyon. Another thing that made me think I should try this was the work of the thinker who wrote the blurb for the book, Timothy Morton. Morton writes about the intersections of literature, philosophy, and ecological thinking. Reading some of Morton’s work made me realize there are ways to approach poetry with an ecological connection in a way I hadn’t encountered before and that I was interested in trying to do.
[Hopkins] Your book’s “Prelude” has echoes of an almost Buddhist-like silence. I’m wondering how you got to that point because the canyon can be quiet, but it’s not silent.
[Oventile] That’s a very thoughtful question and I appreciate you asking it. One of the book reviews that have come out so far talks about the silence of the words in this book. In a way, that might take an author aback because an author might say, “Oh dear, my words are silent. Where’s my voice in this book?” But I was glad to see that sentence in the review. It helps to listen if one is silent. Without some silence somewhere, it’s going to be difficult to hear, in this case, Eaton Canyon.
“Prelude” is about a moment I had when I was six, maybe seven. I was just old enough for my parents to feel comfortable leaving me at home by myself for a few hours. They bought a house in Arcadia in the early 1960s. That’s when some houses there had a third or a quarter acre of land behind the house. For kids that was a big space.
My parents had gone somewhere with my siblings and I thought, well, I’m probably supposed to stay in the house but I’m going to wander back there, to that field, that quarter acre of open land. I found myself, I mean this is a 63-year-old giving words to a seven-year-old, but I found myself listening to the silence, in silence.
Biographically, that experience is what this little “Prelude” is tied to. And it is indeed connected to listening in different pieces in The Canyon.
[Hopkins] So it’s more about the nature of the listener rather than silence in the environment?
[Oventile] There’s a lot going on in the canyon environment to be heard. Sometimes quite a lot. The canyon has a quite various soundscape. The listener needs to allow for silence to welcome that soundscape.
[Hopkins] I had a couple of questions about thematic elements in the book. One of the things that you use quite a bit in your poetry is the manipulation of time. Not from a standpoint of changing events, but just manipulating them back and forth. And I’m curious about how you see time. Do you see it as a stage where history performs? Do you see it as an environment? What do you see it as?
[Oventile] Of course there’s clock time, and that’s real enough. Again, I take some inspiration from Timothy Morton, who is a member of a school of philosophy called object-oriented ontology. That’s worth mentioning in relation to this time question. Graham Harman is another of these object-oriented ontologists. Harman has been arguing that time is a function of objects. Abstract space and time are useful, for example as measuring tools. But actual times and actual spaces are functions of objects.
[Hopkins] What you’re saying, if I could paraphrase, is that objects exist in time.
[Oventile] Times are actualities emergent from objects, from real, distinct, particular entities. For example, the geological epoch the Holocene. You can measure it abstractly in years, approximately 11,700. But that time period is as real as things get. The Holocene emerges from a particular configuration of the Earth system (the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere), for example with a particular average surface temperature. Similarly, consider a season. That’s a real time. Spring is temporal and fully real. You don’t have what we call spring on Mars because the configuration of objects on Earth that precipitate the time we call spring is not there on Mars. Roughly, those are some thoughts about time that I’m trying to work with in this book.
[Hopkins] That’s a fascinating perspective. I was thinking about time in terms of the framework for memory. And how much memory has to do with the perception of objects. Does an object exist if it’s not in your memory or if it’s not perceived?
[Oventile] The actuality of objects, their independence from our minds, is an important ecological question. One way to distinguish the mind dependent from the mind independent would be to say something entirely mind dependent would be wholly a function of a person’s will. Mind independent entities are kind of stubborn. We can try to do stuff with them, but there are limits to what we can do with them, and that’s a signal of their independence from us, of their irreducible actuality.
[Hopkins] Is there a tipping point or boundary between mind independent and mind dependent?
[Oventile] The response that comes to my mind is I don’t know, I’m not sure. In a severe blizzard, if you add or subtract one snowflake what does that do?
[Hopkins] Normally, not much. But one snowflake can be the difference between an avalanche and no avalanche.
[Oventile] That’s true. I think that’s interesting. There’s something that sets the avalanche off. It might be Victor Frankenstein yelling up to a snow-laden mountain slope at Mont Blanc. He’s trying to start an avalanche. He’s hiking out there because his experiment was disastrously successful. The creature, which he abandoned, has gone rogue. He goes up into the mountains and he basically starts yelling and the implicit point is he wants to start an avalanche that would bury him.
I guess I’m a Frankenstein fanatic.
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (published in 1818) is not just doing PR for the science of the early nineteenth century. The novel shows Mary Shelley trying to get her imagination caught up with what she knew, which included proto-Earth system science. There’s a lesson there for us. The Holocene is in the rearview mirror, yet we generally walk around as if the Holocene now exists and will continue to exist.
Mary Shelley might note that the way many of us imagine the ecological situation has not caught up with what we know about that situation. I certainly haven’t caught up to what I think I know about climate change. Imagination is, for better or worse, inescapable. I’m trying to do that…catch up a little bit.
[Hopkins] There’s an example in your poems, which is attuned to your comment about Frankenstein, where you have a little bit of body horror regarding a tarantula hawk.
[Oventile] That’s where the tarantula doesn’t know exactly what’s happening to it, other than the fact that something is.
[Hopkins] Right. And then what emerges from the spider is a new tarantula hawk. How much thought went into the construction of those concepts of symbiosis in your book?
[Oventile] Well, thank goodness for whatever tiny critters live in my gut that help keep me going. That’s symbiosis. If you have life, you have symbiosis. I’m assuming symbiosis is pervasive, that it’s symbiosis all the way down.
[Hopkins] Some of the things you write about have to do with the theme of impermanence. You have a poem about the El Dorado Inn, a steakhouse that decided to go sailing away during a flood in the canyon.
[Oventile] My father took me to Eaton Canyon to witness the 1969 flood that took out the El Dorado Inn. It turned out the canyon was just a really bad place to build a restaurant.
Fast forward to the fall of 2022. The recent origin of that poem is, I was hiking in the canyon near the reservoir and crossed the stream bed. And in the sand was a ring of bone. And I said, uh-huh, that’s interesting. Because it was clearly cut with a kitchen saw. I realized this bone was from somebody’s steak. That triggered thoughts about the restaurant and memories of seeing it flooded out.
[Hopkins] The Eaton Canyon of this book is the canyon prior to January 7th of this year. When did you begin writing The Canyon? I know you began writing the individual poems long before the Eaton Fire.
[Oventile] I wrote the first poem in October of 2022, and then the last one was from December 2024. All the poems were written before the Eaton Fire.
[Hopkins] So the poem about fire in the canyon is about the 1993 wildfire, yes?
[Oventile] Yes. I thought about that after the 2025 fire and wondered if I needed to modify the poem prior to publication. I decided against it.
[Hopkins] You also have a poem about castor bean plants, which are not native to the canyon. They’re rather invasive, so that’s why they are being removed.
[Oventile] A given species can rapidly displace another. In this case, castor bean plants displace and replace a number of other species in a way that homogenizes the Eaton Canyon ecosystem, reducing its biodiversity. Now, removing castor bean plants is an intervention by members of yet another species, Homo sapiens.
This process might lead us to question the notion of “nature” in relation to the canyon. And in one way, “nature” came to the “New World” with European colonization.
[Hopkins] When you say nature came to the Americas through European colonization, what do you mean by that?
[Oventile] “Untouched by human beings”: let’s just say that’s a go-to definition of nature. Imagine conducting a survey of shoppers on Colorado Boulevard. We ask them to define nature for us by selecting phrases to describe it. And one phrase we offer is “untouched by human beings.” I bet a lot of people would check that box.
A legal framework for colonization was to declare an area “terra nullius,” meaning “empty land” or “the land of no one.” That is, land free for the taking. And once the colonists arrived with their diseases, which decimated indigenous peoples, the land came more to resemble nature, if that meant uninhabited by people, with the notion “uninhabited” here being anthropocentric anyway. The concept of nature as we know it is answerable to that history to some degree.
I’ve mostly dropped the word nature from my vocabulary, having some awareness of the relevant history. Archeologist Paulette F.C. Steeves’s book The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere is very instructive on these issues.
[Hopkins] How has your perception as a poet changed since the Eaton Fire? And since the closure in the canyon?
[Oventile] It has definitely changed. I wrote about trout in the canyon in December of 2024. I thought, well, that poem seems to work ok. But after the fire?
You know, for a while I wasn’t thinking too much about writing poetry. Because you have to let people deal with other things.
The Canyon by Robert Savino Oventile has a release date of September 9th, 2025. It is available for pre-order at Vroman’s Bookstore and other local booksellers in paperback and hardback editions. It is published by Atmosphere Press.
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