Seeing Ourselves through Nature, and Other Contemporary Poets

I read all the poems for this weeks’ assignment in one sitting. Patiann Rogers, James Wright, W.S. Merwin, Maurice Guevera, Galvay Kinnell, Laurie Kutchins, Sheryl St. Germain. The only things that separated their words were thick lines, the flip of pages. But my experiences reading these poems were so strong and varying depending on the poet. Whoever thinks that nature poetry is just describing the pretty flowers has oceans to cross. I could not continue reading W.S. Merwin’s “The Last One” past the fifth stanza, and I only reread it today in order to write this assignment. But Sheryl St. Germain’s subject-matter appealed to me because of its proximity to the narrator, it’s ways of connecting nature to human experience. I learned a lot from reading these poems, both about what I appreciate in poetry, and where the themes of my own nature poems tend to be focused. But mostly, this montage of poetry showed me how all interpretations of nature can be equally as beautiful in the hands of a talented artist.
While I had trouble with one of his poems, W.S. Merwin’s works inspired me because they were the only ones in this collection of poetry that I believed to have an environmental message or, as we sometimes say in class, an “agenda.” At no point when I read Merwin’s poems did I feel threatened or preached to, and I think that would have been detrimental to their success. How does he avoid this? I think probably because these poems are abstract and self-deprecating. In “For a Coming Extinction,” the narrator talks directly to the gray whale, a species on the verge of extinction, and tells him what to say as he approaches the creator. The narrator is trying to come to terms with the actions of humanity, trying to forgive himself for being the cause of this great animal’s extinction. He can do this. He justifies it. “Tell him / That it is we who are important.” But the tone of the poem feels full of self-doubt, especially in the line, “winding along your inner mountains / Unheard by us.” Merwin is playing here with a character, man, who believes he can tell the creator what he has created, but at the same time, we don’t hear the words, recognize them as words, of any other animals in this world.
“The Last One” was troubling for me because of the simple sentence structure and repetition. I struggled to get through it, though I appreciate its message. “They” are so ambiguous. Are “they” the loggers, the trees? I think they are both at different parts throughout the poem. The ambiguity of this poem is what stops it from being threatening and accusatory and is what allows the text to evoke themes more subtly, while still retaining the tension.
I thought Patiann Rogers’ poems were successful because they present an unconventional relationship between humans and nature, perhaps urging the reader to stray from his or her prior conceptions of this relationship. In “A Hummingbird: A Seduction,” Rogers’ narrator imagines herself as a hummingbird, her lover the flower on which she is feeding, for Rogers is aware of the erotic natures in which hummingbirds suck nectar from flowers. She uses language that is evocative of love making, words like “sucking, “performance” “egg,” “semen,” “came.” She’s not hiding it. In this last stanza, “And I would take you and take you and take you” is repetitive, suggesting a sexual rhythm and also obsession.
Similarly, in “A Blessing,” the narrator describes a relationship between herself and a pony, one that the reader may be unfamiliar with. “I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,” she writes, “For she has walked over to me / And nuzzled my left hand.” The narrator connects with the animal in a way that transcends their species. Feeling the happiness that accompanies this experience, she writes, “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”
Rogers uses nature in every facet of these poems. The stories themselves are relating to experiences in nature, with many beautiful images of animals and plants. But also, the narrators’ emotions become that of the natural world. “I would break / Into blossom.” Rogers’ characters transcend species, they become plants. Rogers is acutely aware of the emotions of nature, the sensuality of the flowers, the eroticism of the hummingbird. This is what makes her poems successful. They are vibrant through and through.
Sheryl St. Germain shares similarities with Patiann Rogers. Both poets use nature as a mirror to reflect their human emotions. St. Germain takes this a little further in her writer, summoning events from her life, relationships with lovers, children, her mother, and finding ways that these stories reflect in her natural surroundings. I really like this kind of writing about nature because it shows a deep personal connection with the environment and also conveys how like us the animals and plants are. “At the Equator” resonated with me especially. I tried to imagine any of the other poets we read and what their poem about the equator would be. The equator. It’s not even a tangible thing. But it’s a place and it’s deeply symbolic. A line that separates. St. Germain combines what is personal and specific to that which is natural, creating something erotic. As I reader, I feel a connection to her narrators as I do when reading Mary Oliver, that I am joining her on a walk, reflecting with her on what she sees. The difference, and one that I very much like, is that St. Germain delves into the past. These characters are real.
Every week in my fiction class, we have to write one hundred words or less on the subject of one word. Someone chooses the word each class, and this week the word is “yellow.” After I read these poems, I wrote my one hundred-word assignment on “yellow.” I didn’t post one last week for the Mary Oliver assignment so I thought I would share this one here. I don’t know much about writing poems, but I’m trying.

My Mother’s Tomatoes

I woke late in the afternoon
as teenagers often do
to the summer sun through my
window, the cicadas,
my own hot sweat.
In the kitchen was a bowl
of cherry tomatoes, freshly
picked from my mother’s garden.
They were shiny and still
yellow. Unripe and transparent.
I could see right through
their blotchy skins.

Why does she do this?
They would sleep soundly
another night, clasped
to strong green stems.
Is it too hard to let the tomatoes grow?

“Why I went into the Jungle” reminds me very much of a story that I recently wrote for my non-fiction class about my experience in the jungle. What I appreciate about this poem is something I’m starting to do in a lot of my writing. The narrator here went into the jungle because she wanted “…to feel / darkness heavy and wet around me / like sex or death, the molecules of night /dancing in my skin like jaguars.” The jungle is extremely sensual, and to be there, to really be there, is to become a part of it. In this poem, I feel the narrator taking on the jungle’s character, becoming the malarial waters, being born again a dark thing. To go to the jungle, you have to be willing to become that which the jungle embodies: wildness. In my story, the narrator undergoes a transformation, and by the end there is hardly a distinction between herself and the character of the jungle. I like the idea of a place being a character in a story or a poem and the human characters adopting or becoming part of that place. Again, I think this is because it makes the reader view his environment and nature in a more intimate way, a way that perhaps he’s never thought about before. Anything that we can do as writers to help people get closer to nature is important.
Reading all these poems was enlightening for me because I’m finding more and more that I really do enjoy poetry, though I’ve never had any formal training. The different types of contemporary nature poetry excited me and got me thinking about what issues I’m pursuing would be more effectively written on a poetic front.

Vista 6

A miraculously warm day. It’s like summer, I think, sitting barefoot in the grass. I tickle my toes against the clover, the crabgrass. It’s still green, though it feels cold and a little wilted. It’s not the crisp carpet it was a month ago during the strong September heat. But just a couple days ago they said it would snow, and I feel like I’m getting a treat. I’m staying up past bedtime, being rewarded a second dessert. Nature is in retrograde, protesting the dying season, allowing us an extra burst of life. The sky is powder blue, without one cloud to spoil it. There are bugs again, tiny little fruit flies. Were they just born? Even those who you’d think wouldn’t be fooled – the little insects – think it’s spring. I don’t have the heart to tell them that in a couple days the ground will freeze and they’ll be gone. But for now, they can crawl on my legs, for that’s what they’re doing.
Even the crickets are back, vibrating away in the bowing reeds of wheat.
I’ve been feeling it too – the retrograde. Some of it has to do with the changing season. Like a little girl, I feel the urge to suddenly jump on the crunchy leaves I pass on my way to school. I don’t stop myself. At Whole Foods they had free samples of hot apple cider, and smelling the spicy cinnamon, I immediately wanted some, but though I should first ask my mother’s permission. At Hay Day, a market in our town, the cider was always scalding hot.
Mostly I’ve been thinking a lot about my brother. For years, I’ve held certain opinions of him – ones that may be based on things he did in his adolescence – things I’m too stubborn to forgive – and suddenly I’m writing all about my childhood for my classes. I’m remembering him as my little brother, my friend, my companion. As I’m writing with nostalgia about my experiences in nature from my youth, I’m realizing that he was there with me the whole time. Now, more than I’m homesick or missing the ocean or my childhood, I’ve realized that I miss the closeness we had when we played together in the woods near my house. And I feel to blame that we don’t have it anymore.
I can thank this program for helping me recognize these emotions. I’m churning up memories that have been settled at the bottom of my mind for a long time. I hadn’t thought about running through the woods with Jon and picking raspberries for so many years. Writing is serving as a sort of therapy – an uncovering.
The past weeks of autumn have been gray. It has rained drearily almost every day. Today the sun shines so brightly, and for the first time this fall, I can see how vibrant and intensely beautiful the leaves are. They were surely as vividly yellow and green and orange yesterday and the day before, but now I can really see them.

Response 6: Walking Through Oliver's Delicate Forest

            When I read Mary Oliver’s collection of poetry and essays, Blue Iris, I felt as if I was walking through the forest with her, or along the beach, and stopping to look at all the flowers and trees and animals that we happen across.  Her approach to writing nature poems, it seems, is a coveted ritual in which she takes a walk through the forest, sees something beautiful, and then spends the rest of the walk musing over that experience.  You can feel the rhythm of her walking in many of the poems she writes; in “Morning Glories,” “The Sunflowers,” and “Goldenrod,” the stanzas are separated to even look like she is climbing somewhere.  They are short, breathy lines, and you feel like she is writing them as she walks, perhaps back to her house after having seen the sunflowers in the field.

            She has a deep connection with a natural world that resonates in her poetry, making her work unique and identifiable.  Many of her poems are in the first person, and reflect on her physical interactions with the plants and the trees.  Toward the end of the book, she focuses on mortality, often thinking about death as she lies in the grass.  In “White Flowers,” she reminded me a lot of Emily Dickinson, when she writes, “Never in my life / had I felt myself so near / that porous line / where my own body was done with / and the roots and the stems and the flowers / began” (51.)

            One of my favorite poems was “Some Questions You Might Ask” because it addresses a subject matter I think about a lot, and she addresses it in the same delicate way she does with all her poems.

 

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?

Who has it, and who doesn't?

I keep looking around me.

The face of the moose is as sad

as the face of Jesus.

The swan opens her white wings slowly.

In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.

One question leads to another.

Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?

Why should I have it, and not the anteater

who loves her children?

Why should I have it, and not the camel?

Come to think of it, what about maple trees?

What about the blue iris?

What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?

What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?

What about the grass?

 

            This poem is so beautiful to me because it finds a way to approach a topic that is so difficult to address.  Questions are the only way we can talk about animals’ souls and whether or not creatures besides humans feel.  Oliver’s imagery is graceful, subtle, yet so suggestive.  “The swan opens her white wings slowly.”  The majority of the poem is questions, because as I said, we can only ask questions.  What is the soul?  Who has it?  What right do we have to say that animals don’t have it?  “Why should I have it, and not the anteater?”  Oliver doesn’t answer the questions.  She can’t.  But the only lines that aren’t questions in the poem suggest to the reader, without threatening, that we need to think beyond what we know.  “I keep looking around me. / The face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus.”  “The swan opens her white wings slowly.”  “In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.”  Oliver discovers something in the actions of these animals, their intricate movements, their love.  How can we say that they don’t have a soul?  If it is human compassion that we are using as an excuse to distinguish ourselves from other species, then should that not be all the more reason to look for similarities between us?  At the end of the poem, she extends the question to everything on the earth – the stones, the leaves, the lemons.  This poem is about selflessness, about respect.  It’s ok to form opinions, to decide what you think has a soul and what doesn’t.  But first, isn’t it important to ask these questions?  Isn’t it your responsibility to ask these questions, to really think about it?

            Oliver’s poetry is relaxing in its transcendental quality.  When reading it, I feel detached from society, wholly immersed in her setting, the forest, the walks she takes, her mind.  She is distinct from society when she is in this element.  She frees the raccoon from the trap and then runs like the raccoon, touching the touch-me-nots.  “oh, life flew around us, everywhere.”  When she recalls her younger years, camping in Ohio with her friend in “A Blessing,” she is separate from the strip-mined forests.  She is of the first-growth forest.  At Blackwater, she lies in the grass and becomes one with the earth, feeling the roots almost take hold of her.  To read Mary Oliver is to participate in this relationship with nature.  I could not help but feel a part of this connection when I walked with her through the forests of Blue Iris.  It was tranquil, peaceful, delicate.  I wanted to cry, almost, upon reading of the baby skunk.  I think all of Oliver’s poems will echo with me for a long while.  In my mind, her footsteps patting lightly on leaves are a comforting and familiar sound.

Vista 5

It’s 8pm on Tuesday night, and because of a massive overwhelming never-ending flood of work I’ve had this week, I haven’t had a chance to come to my nature spot until now.  OK, maybe I could’ve come earlier today, but I secretly wanted to visit the grassy hill at night, because I feel like every week I end up going at the same time, which is getting boring.

  I immediately regret this decision.  It’s FREEZING.  My hands are shaking as I’m typing and this entry is going to take twice as long to write because I have to go back and correct half the words because they’re not even English, they’re icicle language or something.

            This is the first time I’ve seen my place in the dark.  Thankfully it’s not pitch black.  There are lights that illuminate the pathways and the tree-house stairway.  In fact, it’s interesting because I can see the stairway more clearly now than I can during the day.  It really does twist around like a snake.  There’s fencing on the sides, should someone fall, and thick black shiny railings for those who need to steady themselves.

            I haven’t been here in two weeks, and the leaves really have changed since my last visit.  While some are still green, many are bright orange, the tips blending to squash yellow. They are the colors of autumn apples, and especially right now, in the dark, this whole place reminds me of trick-or-treating on Halloween night as a child.  And I’m very scared. 

Every night I face the dilemma of whether or not I want to walk to class, knowing that it will be dark by the time I have to walk home.  This neighborhood is very safe, but still, it’s always worrisome to be walking home alone in the dark.  I can’t believe that soon the clocks will change and I’ll be walking to and from class in the pitch black.

            Someone just walked by.  OH MAN.  “What is this crazy girl doing?” she’s thinking.  I look insane.  And I’m the one who’s scared?  I’m crouching against the side of the hill with my laptop on my knees, wearing a big furry Russian bomber hat typing in the dark. Sketchy sketchy.  She’s just walking to class probably.

            Not a star in the sky.  What is it about Pittsburgh?  Rain every morning, cloudy every afternoon.  I have a feeling the winter is not going to be to my liking.  The grass beside me is shivering.  No, it’s not the wind, I swear.

A DEER.  Oh my god.  Two deer just walked by.  They saw me, stopped quick, then darted into the woods.  If that’s not some sort of sign, I don’t know what is.  My first Pittsburgh deer.  I would not see that in the daytime.  That made this frozen night escapade worth it.

I’m noticing now that language is sporadic when you’re in a situation like this.  I don’t have the patience or the facility to use long sweeping prose.  My hands are shivering and I feel like if I don’t write as quickly as possible my joints will freeze up.  But seeing the deer, characters that I’ve paid so much attention to in my writing over the last few weeks, really is an interesting coincidence.  “I have not seen a deer the entire time I’ve lived in Pittsburgh,” I said in my last place blog.  It inspired my midterm piece.  The deer are letting me know that they’re here.  Not even in Schenley Park, but right here, where I frequent every day, so close to where I live!

Response 5: Wildflower Garden of Eden

 

            I finally got out of the city.  No more sirens, no more lawnmowers, no more gridded streets – only rolling hills, leaves bursting into fiery reds, oranges, sharp cold autumn air.  I finally got outside.  Some days, it kills me to say it, I won’t leave my apartment until the sun is already setting.  Or worse yet, on the bad days when I have so much work for classes, I won’t even leave my apartment at all.  Ken Lamberton wishes he could reach through the window of his cell to touch the saguaro cacti that grows in the free open air.  I have the ability to leave my apartment, to go see those two squirrels who all day long, run up and down the stairs of the fire escape outside my back window.  But no.  One more page, I tell myself.  It’s a self-imposed prison.

            Eden Hall Farm was open, free, and so much fun.  Mostly, I was happy that I had to be there.  Normally, on Sunday morning I would wake up and start doing work.  This was a welcome alternative.  For me, farms are idyllic, an alternate reality, somewhere I’ll escape to when I’m done with this current lifestyle.  I do admit, my experience on farms is somewhat limited.  I’m not from a farming community, though I’m very jealous of anyone who was raised in that tradition.  The word “farm” has two associations for me.  “Old McDonald” farms – I think of the animals.  These are the farms I don’t know much about.  But anytime I visit one (this past summer I went to the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts,) whoever is with me has to literally tear me away from the animals, or else there’s a chance I’d crawl into their pens, curl up in a heap of muddy hay, and live out the rest of my days as a trowel-feeder.

            The other type of farm, the one I’m more familiar with, is the kind I spent two months living on in Costa Rica.  “Arbofilia,” it was called.  A tree farm, aimed at regenerative, sustainable farming of the rainforests.  We grew saplings in rows, quite like crop-farming you’d see here, then we’d strap on our machetes, dig the saplings up, climb a mountain, and replant them in the remotest areas of the peak.  Thousands, we must’ve planted.  Who knew how many actually took root?  We were trying to recreate something that had been lost, do something that had been undone.  There was once a paradise on this planet, a garden of beautiful trees and flowers.  It had been logged, destroyed.  As we climbed the steep cliffs, falling, cutting open our legs, insects attacking us, I realized that our efforts proved that the paradise was still there – our caring enough to replant these tiny little saplings – wasn’t that something?

            We want the rainforests to regenerate so our world can become sustainable.  I think of organic farms as sustainable establishments.  In the same way that religious people are looking forward to salvation, I fantasize about abandoning my current lifestyle and moving to a farm, where everything is self-sustaining, clean, and organic.  When I think of “gardens” I automatically think about Eden, Adam and Eve’s utopia.  What did they do all day?  In Milton they tended to the plants, made love, lived peacefully.  That is, until the fall.  I guess I consider gardening and farming a very paradisiacal concept.  It’s essential to living harmoniously with the earth (if it’s done in a responsible way – maybe eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is like clear-cutting?)

            I read what I just wrote – fantasy – and I think that while the idea of a garden being a utopic alternative to my current life is a little fantastical, I don’t think living on a farm is a an outrageous idea.  What was most interesting to me about our trip to Eden Hall farm was how much we accomplished in only one hour.  My parents raised me in the suburbs, and even though my mother loves her garden, she for some reason never taught me anything about how to grow plants.  I guess I was too busy digging up all the bugs in the dirt to be bothered to put anything green into it.  But I am sure I could learn the intricacies.  Maybe if I’d been raised on a farm I’d feel differently, but after our trip, I was ready to move.  But then again, I’ve been ready for a while.  If only I could leave my apartment.  

Vista 4

I had a bit of a collision with a black squirrel on my way over here just now.  It was one of those awkward encounters when you think the other creature is going to the left, so you compensate by going to the left as well, but no, he goes right, so there’s a strange little shuffle, an apologetic smile, and you both laugh and go on your way.  The squirrel was totally in his own world.  He was so busy foraging for autumn nuts, he didn’t see me – human – directly in front of him.  Or perhaps he’s a campus squirrel and is so accustomed to close encounters to college students that nearly running into me just now was party of his everyday routine.

As I sit here in the grass looking out over the city, I think about the animals that we form relationships with wherever we dwell.  There are undoubtedly less animals living in cities than in forests, but the ones that do, we notice, we may bond with, we form relationships.

I have not seen a deer the whole time I’ve lived in Pittsburgh.  I’m sure they’re here – in Schenley Park, munching on any and all plants they deem edible.  At home in Connecticut, deer are everywhere.  Driving at night, when two glowing marbles appear off the side of the road, you slow to a stop.  When the deer has successfully skitted across, legs flailed out in all directions, you don’t go.  You wait, because you know there are at least four more waiting in the brush, about to dart in front of your car.  In my backyard and throughout our property, deer had regular trails that they traversed every morning.  My brother and I would go through the woods in the spring with hedge-clippers and cut back the trails, so we too could follow them.  We’d hike along the trails throughout the summer and pick wild raspberries that grew on long prickery vines.  When we came inside with a basket full of berries, my mother would rinse us off and check us from head to toe, because Lyme Disease isn’t as fun.

This past summer, I was standing out on my front porch when three deer that were feeding on brush meandered onto my lawn.  I decided I would stay incredibly still, in fact not move from the position that I was in at that very moment, and see what happened.  The deer didn’t notice me at first, but one of them, a doe with scars all along her side, sensed something.  She kept looking up mid-chew, staring in my direction.  I stared directly at her; I wanted her to know I was alive.  The other deer moved along the lawn, fully-absorbed with their meal.  She walked toward me, small steps, until she was only feet from the porch.  My heart pounded.  Was it possible she would charge the porch?  She wasn’t the healthiest of them, after all.  The other deer made their way over to my mother’s garden and commenced chomping on her tulips.  This is the point when my mother would appreciate me breaking free from my statue pose, stomping my feet, and making banshee noises to make them stop (and also feel guilty – I get the feeling my mother always tries to make the deer feel guilty when they eat her flowers.)  But I didn’t.  This moment was too precious.  My deer walked closer yet.  Suddenly, as if nature had reclaimed her, she bent down and resumed eating grass.  Animal.  She was an animal.  But a moment later she was looking up again, straight into my eyes.  I heard the bending and breaking of a stalk – one of my mother’s plants, and I felt guilty.  I became a banshee.  “All right, that’s enough!” I yelled.  The two deer, who I realized had no clue I was there, went into a frenzy.  Running faster than they should have, their hooves scratched across the driveway, and the two deer slipped and fell on the pavement.  But my deer remained still, unaffected by the screaming.  She gave me a last bewildered glance, then, as if she felt the need to prove to the others she was not human, still animal, not anything more than deer, she trotted into the woods and rejoined her frightened companions.  I stayed on the porch a little longer and saw the two times my deer came back to the lawn by herself, looking toward the porch to confirm that what she had seen there had been real: a living creature, a human, who meant no harm, who did not disturb them, who looked her in the eye, who said, “It’s ok.  I just want to let you know, it’s ok.”

Deer are animals of my home.  In Pittsburgh I am forming relationships with new animals.  Every night at 9:45, as I walk home from school, there is a gigantic slug that crosses the sidewalk by my apartment.  I know exactly where he will be, and I look for him.  Watch out, I think as I approach the one piece of concrete slab, I would never want to step on him.  Sidewalk Slug.  This is something I wouldn’t see at home.