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

i have new poet crushes!

I think I’ve found one of my new favorite poets. This is huge.

Lisa Asagi’s work takes me by the throat. She nails isolation, I mean really freakin nails it. Is her series of dated prose poems (April 14, 15, 22) part of a larger book? The acknowledgments say yes, that they first appeared in Twelve Scenes from 12 A.M. Incredible! Just incredible!

In “April 14,” Asagi sucks me in with her authoritative but delegating tone. She requires the reader to be responsible, she expects the reader to be comfortable without hand-holding and instead trusts us to read through the fragments easily as if we were following her through her sister’s house to the child’s room. Everything changes with the line, “And I wish it could stop,” referencing the plastic fish bobbing mechanically in circles. Before we even reach the following line (equally jarring and vortex-like), she transforms the color of the space from childlike to dark and very adult. I find it interesting that Asagi writes “could” instead of “would.” The phrase, “I wish it would stop,” which I find myself saying often when the dog next door won’t quit barking or when the craziness of scheduling rolls out of control, implies that whatever is happening is physically capable of stopping. That it can happen. When Asagi writes “I wish it could stop,” the room shuts down. She implies with one word a new level of intensity, of impossibility. The poet stops talking about the fish or the room in that moment. She speaks of something much bigger and immortal.

By the next line, we understand this futility, that the ability to stop is rendered hopeless. It expands from the room to the “motion of this living.” Bam! We climax here, this is the moment the poem has been building toward. And surprisingly, she eases us back out. I find that endearing and wonderful; most poets will bring you to the edge and leave you.

I thought a lot about how reading this particular work and others in this week’s reading has already changed my writing. I’m watching what they’re doing and absorbing the directions they’re giving me. I feel like I have new routes to travel, new and more exciting ways to arrive at similar spaces. This is exhilarating. These poets (and Asagi in particular) have rewired tiny parts of my brain, directionally. Even in “April 22,” Asagi writes “But it feels like one by one ropes are being untied and tossed onto a boat I am standing on.” How many times have you known that feeling but not articulated it in a way that makes sense to someone or hasn’t been done a million times? God, I’m in love.

Other poets that are teaching me things:

Agha Shahid Ali, in the poem “A List Memory of Delhi,” re-introduces me to film on the page. The poem reads as if each stanza is a clip from a movie, a series of short scenes in which we get a larger story with ineffable motion. We are literally moving through the poem, we are the camera lens. (This is also really helpful to me for selfish reasons in that I am currently writing poems about memories for which I was not present, much like Ali’s retelling of a time when he was not yet born. Awesome.)

Brandy Nalani McDougall’s poem “How I Learned to Write My Name,” is using similar techniques, but feels more like a single camera angle that moves in and out of focus between the foreground and the background. While she is remembering how she learned to write her name, she’s using this foreground to tell the real story of her father stealing from her mother and leaving while her mother is in the shower, in the background. The distraction is what tells the story, the poem sits at the fuzzy place in between foreground and background. Such a smart and beautiful poem.

Similarly, I thought a lot about how I might learn from these poets’ particular stylistic choices. I’ve already expressed my conflicting feelings about this idea of  “published = finished” on the blog, and I by no means intend to try to edit or workshop these poets. Still, I look at Vandana Khanna’s poem “Alignment” on page 83, for example, and wonder at the job that the asterisks are performing (all the while knowing Elmaz is secretly cringing, hah). I wonder why space is not enough to separate these stanzas and think back to my own work, wondering if & where such punctuation (is an asterisk a punctuation mark?) might function, much less benefit, the poem. I’m also looking at that last stanza where it is mentioned that the parents of the narrative voice met with an astrologer to see if their “stars were aligned.” Could this be a physical/visual enactment of that stanza’s intention, that all of these stars (four sets of three) are aligned neatly & reliably? Whether or not this is the case, I begin thinking about different ways to accomplish the same affect without using a symbol like the asterisk. Khanna has me thinking stylistically and I appreciate it.