“This page faintly stained with / green”: Compost Aesthetics in John Steffler’s That Night We Were Ravenous
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines how John Steffler’s poetry collection That Night We Were Ravenous (1998) destabilizes the humanist impulse to position the “authentic” subject at the core of ecological concerns by employing a compost aesthetic that enacts the innately fragmented nature of human subjectivity. It contends that, for Steffler, the poem is its own ecosystem, one that sits in precarious balance with the world around it. The poems in this collection are exploratory rather than expository; their attempts to discover the self in nature are as ephemeral, slippery, and paradoxical as the language that gives them life. Instead of declaiming poetry as a resource that will allow a return to a utopian space, Steffler’s ecological poems position the human subject as a composite of usable waste attuned to the precarious chaos of nature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".