Nature Poets

It’s quite fitting that I post these thoughts about the nature and place poems as I sit watching the rain. I grew up thinking that one element of poetry was nature. It seemed like most of what I read in K-12 classes was about nature or some form of it – nature’s cleansing (hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms), one specific element of nature (flowers, leaves, trees, roses, etc.) or the transformation of our lives as seen through the lens of nature. So naturally, it was engrained in my mind that poetry should include a conversation or statement about nature.

While I have clearly been exposed to more than nature poetry at this point in my life, I can still say that reading the poems in the Effigies collection really reminded me how beautiful nature poetry can be when done well.

If I may, I want to stray from an “academic” response to these poems and simply speak from the raw emotion I felt as I read them. First, there was McDougall’s assortment. With lines like:

“the dark time of sickness”

“the bitter waters drunk”

“before the metallic salt of blood”

“that blood was not enough to hold her / from the kind of love that opened and closed / like a flower caught between day and night.”

“knowing our father’s tears, yet deeming them / unremarkable”

“I am still the clean one. No one has to know.”

I awe at the image of Po – a female deity – the source of all life – as she “birthed islands.”

The poem Haloa Naka really stays with me long after I have read and studied it. A homage to the taro root, but beautiful without knowing what plant it references. “I take you in as you are—/the taste of earth and light,/ salt-wind sieved through valley rains.”

Then there is, The History of this Place, one of my favorites. Simple in language, yet complex and layered in meaning and emotion – “dark and heavy / like a broth strained from the living.” Yes, that line is heavy like the poem’s ability to deal with history and place and memories in such a small amount of words – maximum impact, minimal words.

How I Learned to Write My Name is one of my favorites from this section. I’m not Hawaiian, but my name is, and I can connect to the memory of dots at the top of my paper to guide me in writing the letters K-I-A-L-A. I can connect to the shared emotion of a mother and a father who didn’t seem to exist on the same page and to the idea that my name in all caps was me yelling to be noticed, to be heard, to be seen. The lines, “my young hands threading dots into letters, / the fullness of my name, it’s shape, shouting” pull me into the speaker’s life and simultaneously reminds me of many moments from my childhood. Equally, the poem Emma, 1993 could have easily been about me and my mother and the wonderings of an 8 year old daughter who doesn’t understand how her love is not enough.

McDougall takes place and nature and turns it inside out by weaving the speaker’s story in with the story of the Island and the plants that inhabit it and the many deities that protect it. . I didn’t see the same attention to nature in the poems from Totems. While I appreciated many of those poems, none of them spoke to me the way McDougall’s poems did.

The voice of nature in these pieces reminded me of many of the poems from Patricia Smith’s book Blood Dazzler. Smith’s use of personification moves that book in a special direction and now, in my mind, opens a dialogue between an African America female writer and a writer of Kanaka Maoli descent.

I'm curious how others sat with the poems from Totems, Effigies, Wind Shifts, and AAP -- in one sitting back to back or did you experience them at different times? I sat with them in a random order based on which book I could take with me on the bus or BART without too much fuss. This gave me a really scattered reading of the pieces and may account for some of the disconnect I felt as I read the pieces from Totems in relation to the ones from the Pacific Island poets, the Latino poets, and the Asian American Poets (clearly Totems get read at home because it is the heaviest).

peacelovelight

Kiala

Rick Barot’s poem “Bird Notes” explores the idea of placement and displacement in words and lines jam-packed with meaning. We’ve got surface meaning and under-the-surface meaning. There’s an exploration of nature, color, belonging, and movement (and non-movement).

The surface meaning is about birds and how each bird belongs to a season and has a particular appearance. The reference to Persephone indicates the change of the seasons. The poem brings us through the year and back again. Each section, each bird, tells us something about the cycle. The cardinal is “the deep/Benedictine red/of fall leaves.” The crow is in the winter snow and is black “woodsmoke/ waxing on its skin.” The blue jay is blue, and “it rustled off/to a new branch.” The “new branch” shows us the change from winter to spring. The hummingbird appears “midsummer” and is blurred. The image of time as a process is reinforced.

The use of the birds, however, illustrates humanity’s own journey through time. I have questions about whom, specifically, may be described here. Who is “he”? It is more that just a bird but is there a particular person the speaker is conveying? Is this about the immigrant experience? Is it about a lover’s experience of moving on? Or might it be an experience we may all share of our place in time? In reading and rereading the poem, I saw each of these in the language and descriptions.

Each section of the poem ends with something left behind, each evoking meaning. The first section ends with an additional bird – the owl. Owls are often thought of as wise, all-knowing, and giving nothing away. But it is “an owl-faced parking meter” which gives us the idea that there is a price you pay for staying in one place. The earlier lines, “as if he too/had had to pass through/some fire, had to be saved/just to be here” shows the movement of the cardinal. “He” has been somewhere else, survived an ordeal, and landed here to “perch.” The fire again highlights the red color, but also reminds us of the contrast between the “joss sticks” (Chinese incense) and the Benedictines. Is it a clash of cultures or a clash with another individual? This section says “one more version of come as you are,” but started with a description of a “bandit mask.” His identity was concealed, and makes me ask “who is this?” “what is he doing here?” and “where does he belong?” and “what does it mean to ‘come as you are’?”

The second section ends with a direct reference to time. The crow is “the enraged sound” of its caw, “the staggering/thing someone comes to find/exterior to time.” The outrage that “[h]e has seen it all before” is apparent here; and the idea that “[i]t’s all the same” causes the outrage. If the outrage is “exterior to time,” then nothing ever changes and “the crow is not happy about it! If, like the cardinal, he has been through an ordeal, why has nothing changed? Is there no relief? It’s “staggering.”

When we reach the third section, we find accidental “branch-caught” or “shrub-snagged” evidence of change, but we hear about “the tune of infidelity/being played inside.” Is the outrage then over loyalty? How should one remain faithful – to a country or to a lover? What if you must move on? Persephone was kidnapped and raped and brought to the underworld. Suddenly a poem about birds becomes something much more. Often, we think about birds as symbols of freedom – they can fly anywhere they want, can’t they? But here we see their activities are limited.

The hummingbird section completes the cycle and echoes some of the imagery from earlier sections. He is a “beloved incidental” – a little something – almost “a kind of avian kitsch”, “[b]ut even the dark/didn’t keep his business/from continuing.” He has flown away from his “bottle-cap nest.” He is free to go; life moves along. The “blurred hinge/of his body and wings steadied him.” We’ve got movement, but we’ve also got stability. At the end of this section, we see the “blush/on the air he had occupied.” He may be fading from one place or memory, but it is clear that he is, nonetheless, still there.

Sheila Joseph

The Plac(e)ing of Language

As I was doing this week's readings I was trying to think of place, to think of setting and home and belonging but for some reason the connection between the poetry and the idea just didn't deepen for me. I could see the connections between the poetry selected and place but didn't really feel them enough to write on them. Then I decided to really expand my idea of place beyond the physical. Putting this in the context of Poets of Color and colonialism made a lot of sense for me. I think that for those who are part of a diaspora home takes on such an amorphous and diffuse space. What does home mean when the place you are told is your home doesn't match the home in your head? I'm especially thinking of that cliched and still popular insult of "Go back where you came from!" How do other peoples ideas of our homes, our spaces relate to us when we might not speak the language of the place they consider our home? Or haven't been there since childhood? I can't help but think of so many people being deported back to homelands they never knew that house tongues they never spoke or only speak very few words in.

This thinking led me to the Najarro poem "Between Two Languages" and just looking at the form of the poem, the way that at first she translates the spanish words for the reader providing a bridge for readers who don't have the language. But then she stops, the spanish words cease being defined and become lines in and of themselves, their italics almost seem to separate the poem into segments. They become borders, perhaps barriers for some, but definitely some kind of divide within the poem itself and within the idea of the poem - existing between two languages. Language itself becomes a huge border in the idea of place, that lines can be drawn and barriers formed by arbitrary lines and the assumption that language--always moving and changing--falls within those lines. It feels as if Najarro is inviting us to explore that space for ourselves. She translates enough words that the reader can get a general meaning of the lines that follow without translation but it's not easy, it's not handed to the reader, you have to work for it and find the places for entrance yourself.

The poem talks about separation, the miseria of the narrator as compared to that of a random cry in the night. It resounds with the the idea of language acting as a bridge between peoples, an invitation into a poem, culture, a life but also the barrier it forms. The easy way it is to throw away other people simple because they speak a different language, or a different dialect. The way that the lack of a shared language/place can lead to an absence of any empathy within ourselves for others. Najarro talks about someone else's stifling cry--for me this felt like she was trying to represent a sound that can go beyond language, between languages, a cry of pain is a cry of pain, a yell of anger is a yell of anger. There are certain sounds/tones, just as there are certain facial expressions that tend to be recognizable across many peoples of the world regardless of language. Najarro ties this into compassion, that this "stifled cry" leads the narrator to feel compassion. So then is language the barrier that prevents true compassion? Is this what Najarro means by the title? Is that space between languages where true communication lies, in the act of compassion itself?

Reading this poem I thought about last week's discussion around english and the privileging of that language. So as I read I tried to see if I did that, was I glossing over the spanish just to get to the english sections of the poem? I deliberately forced myself to slow down over the spanish to absorb it more fully and try to access the poem as a whole, not just the english parts. I don't know if I succeeded but it's something I'm trying to be more aware of as we go forward.

-Naamen

Nature Becomes Her

Of all the assigned works, I found Cathy Tagnak Rexford's Black Ice to be the most compelling and poignant with regards to the topic of nature and place. Not only is Rexford describing the myriad features of the place such as ice and snow, the tundra, permafrost, dark mountains and the sea, but she also gives a glimpse of what the people need from their surroundings in order to survive. You cannot go far without a reference to the importance of whaling or of using sealskin to craft garments that protect against the cold. Thus, place is not merely the characteristics that make up the physical location, but the characteristics, wants, desires and needs of the people who live there. The inhabitants of Rexfords poems are as much a physical part of the place as the flora and fauna that live there and the landscapes that she describes. In "Baleen Corset" for example, mankind is not making this item of clothing from the environment, but the environment is clothing mankind. The poem describes the whale as an active participant in the making of the corset. The whale itself becomes the corset: " His whitened flukes/ extend into arms, he wraps them/ around her waist; fastens eyelets of a/ baleen corset; cracks rotted ice/ from her shoulder blades, ribs, hips." In this scenario, the whale has crawled from the ice in order to fuse the two-- mankind and nature-- into one. The painful verbs, "cracks," "rotted" and "blades" show that this act of blending is not a pleasant one for either of the parties and seems to take the domination from either party from the idea of mankinds "colonization" of nature. In this piece, as with all the Rexford work we read, both parties do what they do out of necessity, not out of a desire for power. The whale is more than just "bone strips" that give the corset shape, but those bone strips contain his voice. Rather than being overtaken by mankind, represented by the girl in the corset, the whale and nature become a part of mankind, both symbiotic and strained.

Rexford's use of mask imagery also seems indicative of the Inupiaq's desire to mesh with their surroundings. In each case, the mask the characters put on is a mask that appears as a thing in nature: the loon, the caribou, the cedar. In the making of each of these masks, the thread of sinew that binds the item together are the most important part. These threads are comprised from the items found in nature and are described as being long lasting, or as Rexford states in "Uncle Foot," "proof/ that a stitch endures." The economy and subsistence-focused living of the Inupiaq seems to chide the American economy for its ideals of excess, and with good reason. All of the items in "Uncle Foot" are built to last and are a part of the culture of the people Rexford is describing. The "sealskin boot/ unspoiled for/ one thousand years" along with other words such as "shorefast", "entombed", and "resin" gives the reader a feeling of endurance that parallels nature with the items man has made from nature. Although Rexford does not mention America or other capitalistic societies directly, it is because they are missing that the impeachment occurs. Rexford paints a world in which the capitalistic concerns of the consumer nations do not even play a part. You might get the impression that there are capitalistic concerns when Rexford talks about the whaling industry and the oilrigs, but they are usually mentioned in the singular, making them appear as less of a threat. 

There is, however, a tinge of sadness and change when the author writes, "Migration," and the reader sees that the way of life described in Rexford's poems likely cannot continue. The narrator describes herself as "a cedar mask, devouring my own tongue," and all of the following allusions are to those items of lore we place in museums so that we can remember and feel a nostalgia for past times. This poem shows the human being morphing into newer surroundings: the busy street, the radio static, the "concrete nightmares." Like "The Negative" things become other things, "sweat absorbs into the mud," and "the blackest shade [is] giving birth to copper." 

--H.K. Rainey

Corral & Khanna

I’ll admit, I almost passed over Eduardo C. Corral, readying my eyes to skim the lines, just to have seen them, and move on to The Wind’s women poets listed in this week’s reading. I didn’t know anything about him except that he was a man and I was tired of reading men’s poetry, assuming it held experiences did not reflect my own. In the end, Corral was my favorite poet of the bunch and I learned that shared experience (shared feeling? I don’t have my notebook and forget what we substituted for universality) can come in the most unexpected moments, unexpected pieces of verse.

I can’t say that his experiences have been my own, because they have not, but the honesty with which he laid them on the page (and the beauty they took on through his delicate, visceral imagery!) kept me reading and rereading. We begin in the wilds of Tucson, wild animals in the night, and are suddenly witnessing Corral’s parents making love. He writes with such authority, as though he is describing his own lover—I sense not discomfort, but curiosity, sensuousness and the coming together of man, woman, sky and earth. The image of the crucifix in the mouth, roped around the throat, stays with me. The power of the mother’s desire throttles the father—the throws of intimacy crash against the question of mortality. She takes the crucifix in her mouth like the body of Christ, not asking to be forgiven of sins, but creating them. The mother is so much more visible than the father in this poem, and the poet’s obsession/voyeurism beams through this image. Finally, the poem ends with the images of stars and sperm mingling, like his mother’s body is all of the sky and the heavens.

Corral stays with the theme of sensuality, his sexual awakening and his relationship to his parents in the next poems, openly confronting and considering taboos. The racial profiling he is taught in his teenage job turns into the opportunity to nurture his budding sexual desires. Next, the lines, “I learned how to make love to a man / by touching my father.”—I’ve never read a line that is so unafraid. The scenes he offers in couplets are the same scenes we have seen in commercials for instant coffee, cereal or anti-depressants: father and son bonding, purely, innocently. But they are also laced with eroticism, an eroticism we might have ignored had the first lines not been to flatly declared. The coming together of parent-child relationships and early understanding of sexual desire is not uncommon, but seldom spoken—especially between father-son and mother-daughter. How often have we heard of Oedipal complexes with mothers and sons and the recasting of father-daughter relationships after a girl’s puberty? Here he lays is before us, sans trauma or shame. I was at first afraid to read on after the first two lines, afraid of what I would found. And what I found was something so innocent, so natural, and still so quietly exciting—I let myself read it again.

In the next poem we see him again in nature, again a voyeur, again consumed by his mother. How is his gaze at his mother’s sensuality different than the traces of eroticism between his father and himself? I feel this poem with nearly every sense—the leaves crackling on bare feet, a dress troubled by a breeze, the scent of crushed fennel seeds, an unfurling peacock’s tail against fruit crates. These sense memories deliver us from a future point (time unknown) to a scene etched into the poet’s childhood memory. He suggests the hairbrush is shining in the light of the moments before dusk, but I imagine he doesn’t remember what was shining—just remembers the light, and his mother’s luminosity, in a moment coveted, stolen, and carefully, deeply buried away.

His greatest lines, though, I found in section 2 of “Poem after Frida Kahlo’s Painting The Broken Column:” “Once a man offered me his heart like a glass of water.” Was ever a broken heart more aptly described? Having to push away the thing that you yearn for because you see that thing, that person, is incapable of seeing inside of you, from your eyes, is incapable or maybe, he simply won’t. “In bed while we slept, our bodies inches apart, the dark between our flesh a wick. It was burning down. And he couldn’t feel it.” The burning wick, the image of a dark, dividing chasm (“Not because he was a beast or white—“ what is unsaid here—that he cannot understand that he is white, or can be a beast) this image scorched me. Maybe we have all felt that wick, different kinds of wicks, burning down between us and the ones we wish to love.

And now, a brief moment with Vandana Khanna. In “The India of Postcards” I saw someone who was changed by the West returning to a place that is supposed to be theirs but—suddenly, tragically—is not. In another class I am reading Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham. He goes on a bicycle pilgrimage back to Vietnam, where he finds himself both the revered and despised as a Viet-kieu, Vietnamese who have left to become foreigners and returned. He shields himself against drivers’ racist epithets as he cycles up the U.S. west coast, then finds himself fainting and vomiting in the heat of Vietnam, no longer being able to stomach his people’s food. Here, too, Khanna (or the poet) cannot drink the water, is drugged on medication, plows through the city and tries to find something small enough for her suitcase to bring home as proof of who she is. The idea of plowing through the city is so simple and powerful—these are crowds she does not know how to navigate, and yet feels impelled to pass through. She admits to wanting to find, “the India of postcards with our faces on the front.” The rawness and honesty of this dense poem is so bold and inviting.

Then, I turn the page to “Two Women,” and feel completely lost. I have just seen the poet as a Westerner attempting a return to her estranged roots. Who are these women squatting in the sugar cane? I don’t see her in this poem; I only see a clichéd image of women—a couplet like the couplets of the poem—barefoot and working in servitude. Who are they? Is this a relative, her mother? A description of an image she has seen? The poem is political in that it identifies the class of these women, but it also seems to be grasping for a trite, romantic image—one we have seen too often. Why do the women recognize the Verdi coming out of the shudders? Why are lost love, war, motherhood and grandmotherhood covered in only two stanzas? The images in the previous poem may be familiar, but they are her own—at least this is my sense.

Liberation and Genny Lim-Nature and Place

I remember meeting Genny’s daughter.  I remember Genny telling me she had lost her in a car accident.  I felt so much sorrow to hear this.  Knowing that a child should naturally outlive their parents and how much grief she must have felt experiencing such a loss.  She was her only child.

In reading Genny Lim’s poem “Animal Liberation” I felt a sense of emotional release and spiritual upliftment.  Her poem expresses her own liberation; to let go of her grief so that her daughter may transcend to spirit world.  In her story Genny uses an unusual metaphor, a duck, which is also culturally specific to her Chinese-American experience.  As readers we can infer that before Genny bought this duck, it’s death would have been looming.  In her deliberate action of freeing this duck from it’s “cage” by buying it and giving it back to nature, a lake of water, Genny feels the power and satisfaction of witnessing and becoming a part of helping another spirit experience freedom, a chance to live and be happy.  

Genny does a beautiful job of setting the scene in San Francisco’s Chinatown with a hint of humor, descriptive detail and dialogue that appears more like prose.  She also starts many of her lines with “I” statements, bringing us directly into her story, while slowly building the anticipation and curiosity of the reader to arrive at Stow Lake.  The period she buys the duck to it’s release shows a strong feeling of tenderness as one would for a child.  Here her description freeing the bird to enjoy the water is likened to that of an infant or child,

“She tumbles into the lake and as soon as her body makes contact

    with liquid

There is instant recognition

She dives into the pool and emerges with her feathers wet and 

   glistening

She spread her wings wide for the first time and quacks with joy

She dives in and out again and again

Baptizing her entire body with miraculous water...”

Toward the end of the poem Genny notes that the duck’s freedom extends to her own happiness and letting go of her beloved daughter.  She says,

“Free!” I breathe, “at last!” One life saved for another one lost 

Good-bye my darling, Danielle!”

This is a loving homage or ceremony similar to how some of us spread the ashes of a loved one in nature after they have passed.  In this case water becomes a vessel in which life emerges and thrives reminding us how precious it really is.  I appreciate this and other poems from the section “Nature and Place” in Totems for the sacredness and important role nature plays in one’s life.  I would also agree with Ishmael Reed that poets do tend to have an infinity to connecting with nature and I would also say spirituality.  Genny Lim is definitely one of those special poets who can bring forth both quite gracefully.

I’m proud to say not too long ago in 2006, Genny Lim was the first literary judge for a national award I created through Macha Femme Press for Native American and Latina Women poets called The Xochiquetzalli Award for Poetry.  She generously read through many entries and through a blind reading deliberated determining: First place-Gabriela Erandi Rico, Second place-Nanette Bradley Deetz, Third Place-Celeste Guzman, and Honorable Mention-Luna Maia.

Where is the home where your heart lies?

As I was reading the poems for this week, I was really interested in the complex relationship between the poet of color and the idea of home. For the poet of color even if they are born in America or have American citizenship there is always this question of “going home” and where that home is. I think this is best expressed in the work of Vandana Khanna.

In the poem Spell, the narrator and her companion are traveling through India. Her descriptions of the city going by are a mixture of positive and negative images that seem to address the feelings of confusion for a person who is coming to a place that her parents call home but that she has no concrete connection with. The images are juxtaposed in such away that even the readers are not sure how they are supposed to feel:
“Outside the car window—everything surging—

children scratching glass, never having seen anyone so pale,
broken animals, roads bitten away. India. When I look back

I will remember you crying in the heat of the car,
before we reached the Taj, before we climbed up

the steps, hot grass then cool marble under our feet. We thought
we had seen everything—the President’s house, India Gate with its guards

and faded postcards, Quitar Minar where the man pulled
your arms behind your back, around the pillar for good luck.

You hoped it was worth the ache in your back that followed.
We traveled the city like we didn’t belong, a place I should call home

but as foreign to me as to you.” (Asian American Poetry, 80)
At first the image that we get of India is rough and painful, “surging”, “broken” and “bitten away” but at the same time there are these grand images of the Presidents house and this bringing of good luck. The grand images of modern India and spiritual India are not enough to take away from the broken animals, heat and pain. And yet the narrator recognizes that there should be a connection here, “a place I should call home but as foreign to me as to you.” What is home to her parents and grandparents cannot, simply through visiting, be home to her. While there is the connection of ancestral history there is no personal history for her there except for what is being built out of this visit. She can name these places but she cannot connect with India on the street level.

The poem that follows it is The India of Postcards, where we truly get to see the disconnection between the narrator and the country, which she should call home. Again we get these negative images of an India steeped in illness: “there are so many—cholera, malaria, /meningitis.” (AAP, 81) This time these images are juxtaposed with the place the narrator does call home: “The only thing we wanted we couldn’t have:/ Water—unbottled, un-boiled—pure, sweet, / American-tasting water.” For the first time we get a truly positive description and it’s about America and the privileges of living there. There is a greatness to being able to say you have traveled to India, this we see in the trinkets that the narrator picks up, “hand-painted boxes, raw silk” but there is no beauty in staying there. There is only the ugliness of the disease, heat, dirtiness and cramped spaces. This place that someone calls home the narrator cannot because she cannot find the thing that is in the postcard, the beauty of truly being a tourist and not having to think about what is happening to a people that the narrator should call her own.

The struggle of home is something that all poets of color face. We even see it in the Indigenous poets from the Pacific Rim. Specifically I’m thinking of Po by Brandy Nalani McDougall. What McDougall is focusing on is the time before now, in a purer time that seems so beautiful, the illusion of “home”: “ Before the land was tamed by industry/ the Oceanside resorts and pineapple plantations, / before the cane knife’s rust, the dark time sickness…”(Effigies, 59). There is always a searching for the poet of color for the home of there parents or ancestors memories that they cannot connect to. There is a point where the poet wants to connect with their ancestral homeland, as opposed to the land that they call home, America. There is something about the creation of the space known as America, which makes it impossible to completely connect with the ancestral homeland. There is only the search for whats “Under all the glitter, / we wanted the shards of something we can’t name” (AAP, 81)

As I was reading and thinking about the issue of home I just kept thinking of all the times that I hear of people telling people of different ethnic backgrounds to go back to where they come from or to go home. Home is such a complicated thing for a lot of people but it especially is for those who are second and third generation Americans. There is no home but America for them and yet they feel the guilt of knowing that there is a country that they could call home but they can’t relate to it. Recently someone said to me, “If you went home you’d be eating spicier food than this.” and I asked “ You mean to Menlo Park? No I don’t think I would.” The person rolled their eyes at me and said “No I mean Africa.” This completely shocked me because I’m not second or third generation American. I have no idea how far I am in my family line from coming to America. How does it make any sense for me to call Africa home? Because there is an Ancestral connection? What truly makes a place home, is it ancestral memory or present memory? Even if I went to Africa today and met people that I had blood relation to I wouldn’t consider Africa home. What creates the place we know as home?