Nature and Place

It seems natural to write from nature and place. Yet, the word place connotes one's place in society, one's connection to their place, one's desire to create place in a land that was stolen or raped. And how does place create comfort and safety, yet displacement and fear. How does the poet create place as nurturing but violent. It is not a mythical place that once belonged to a certain culture. It is a shared consciousness, that I feel can be a tension between who has access to culture and who coins culture. Out of all the poems we read, I fell in love with the book Effigies. Just as a reference, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an effigy is "A likeness, image, portrait, whether drawn, painted, or sculptured, or of any other kind."
I loved the poems by Cathy Tagnak Rexford. Her poems take place in nature and her identity takes on the landscape. In "The Negative", Rexford presents a speaker processing an old negative. The tone of the poem suggests that it is an honor to develop them and not a burden.
"The Negative" dramatizes the conflict between the native artist and her subject, particularly as this subject is what the narrator hangs at the museum. Nature is aligned within her words, as she welcomes the baleen and the jawbone. Yet, there is a echo of who has "possession" of the negative. The speaker's state of mind is not detached from her subject. There are many possibilities of who may have possession: the speaker, the whale and the hunter, the museum goers. The whale is caught by the hunter but the narrator notes that the whale "travels to the origin of taboo, never leaving his body." The speaker brings to life the "yellowed reconstructed fragments... restored by hypnosis." Restored by hypnosis asserts the poets position with her subject. Interestingly, a negative photo is being developed by the narrator and is later hung in a museum, where "men and women walk past, pause, and carefully tilt their heads distilling meaning from underexposure." The word underexposure suggests that the photo is insignificant because it did not go through the proper steps to produce a normal image. Thus, it is being taken too soon and is not made for interpretation. Even though the negative transforms, the photo is looked at as an object for interpretation. It is no longer in the hands of the people or the native artist. The feeling is like a "collision." Totems did not compare to the poets in Effigies. I was impressed by the subtle lyrical and raw blunt sounds of the poems. I found myself reading all of the poems out loud and ruminating over the intricate ways native Alaskan and Hawaiian peoples have found their voice, through the use of land. It seems natural to write from nature and then juxtapose it with conflicts that arise. For example, Brandy Nalani McDougall's poem "Return to the Kula House" where barbed wire "was enough to remember without remembering", stretches the meaning of home and place. The fact that the poet chooses to use the word "remember" several times in the poem, shows that memory is stressed, and that the poets house is displaced. Also, the moon takes on many masks. The moon becomes her father, while her mother grips a knife. This accentuates the violent imagery that is implied with her "falling on barbed-wire." Going back to the negative photo. It serves as metaphor for identity. What one wants to expose of too soon or too late. And the budding nature of discovery, the intimacy of the developer and the images that stare back into the grainy after light. ~Melissa Lozano