conceit: (noun) excessive pride in oneself. Alternately, an artistic effect or device; a fanciful expression in writing or speech; an elaborate metaphor.

Conceit connotes snobbishness, a certain smugness or certitude, more unbearable to the extent that it is unwarranted. I love leaning into Walker Percy’s metaphor of the writer as an alien anthropologist visiting Planet Earth, shaking his alien head in wonder. (I’m so full of wonder that I can’t permit an alien species without it, not even in my most vehement imaginings). Nothing is more conceited than man, an upright mammal who posits himself at the center of a universal drama by creating a god in his image, to reflect his greatness. It’s wickedly good. Of course the reader wonders how it will play out.

As for the literary conceit, what could more obvious, more prevalent, more implicated than ecology? On a planet where man, the dominant species, invents a deity that creates for the purpose of conflagration. When I sit down to write the honeysuckle, I have to actively avoid slipping on the green goggles. Isn’t climate change and ecological destruction the crib of things? Isn’t seeing green the skinned knuckle of a poet’s hand whenever they reach to feel a rock? Read Brenda Hillman’s “Poem for a National Seashore”. Dander through eco-poetics. Submit to anthologies that engage the most elemental and incredible conceit. And please send links if you’ve published a poem on this spectrum of life. I want to read it. I want to see what we’re destroying to sustain our unsustainable lifestyles.

The sublime is part of this conceit. And sublimity is quite creepy— it is the bane of materialisms, the inexplicable and unreliable ecstasy. Precisely because statistics, data, and numbers are easily manipulated, I am quite interested in unreliable ontologies. In an essay, “On Sublimity,” Martin Corless-Smith quotes from page 5 of Paul Nash’s Aerial Flowers:

A few years later in the course of making a series of drawings to illustrate Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall, I came upon the sentence referring to the soul visiting the Mansions of the Dead. This idea stirred my imagination deeply. I could see the emblem of the soul—a little winged creature, perhaps not unlike the ghost moth—perched upon the airy habitations of the skies which in their turn sailed and swung from cloud to cloud and then into space once more. It did not occur to me for a moment that the Mansions of the Dead could be situated anywhere but in the sky…the importance of this particular opportunity was that it afforded a further adventure in flight.

The ghost moth. The Mansions of the Dead. Eco-poetics and ghost moths—a soil aerated by sublime possibility for the writer.