What Sparks Poetry

From my seat alongside Rattlesnake Creek, I looked upstream toward the high-elevation wilderness snowfields that framed and fed the floodplain. The water at my feet had once resided there, and before that it existed as moisture trapped inside a cloud, and perhaps before that as fog, the slough’s breath, the valley’s exhalation, ad infinitum. This was doubtless rudimentary elemental positing, but the mere proximity to moving water had at least succeeded in getting me “out of my head.”

This thing I’m calling “terroir” is touched by climate, which continues to change. And change touches us all, but unevenly, some sooner and some later, some more and some less.

You don’t have to do anything extra though. Language comes in and it leaves. I/we pass it around like particles, small poetry aerosols, floating across the air, written through a bodily process. There is no other public, there is only what happens between us.

“Landscape with Jeffers and the Connecticut River” returns to a meadow I’ve known as long as I can remember. My father grew up across the street, and my maternal grandparents lived just a mile or two up Jail Hill. Luckily, a bit of the meadow has been set aside as parkland, so the field where as a child I flew my kite and pretended to fish is still open meadow. Often, in dreams, I find myself wading through its high grass and goldenrod or walking out into the wide green river. I, all my various I’s, am here.

An obsession with silence and space, generative rupture, “lavish absence”—this is one of the ways inherited trauma has shaped my life in ways beyond my control. But these silences and gaps are also essential elements of the creative process. I see these forceful voids as doubled zeros. I see them facing each other like eyes.

Poetry can dive beneath narratives and their erasures. In this poem “For love,” I wanted to look at the complexities and contradictions of the humans who devote their lives to weapons of mass destruction. What drives them? One aspect, the poem suggests, is fear, a fear-tinged love, an anticipatory or active grief about what could be lost, which comes out of their strong love. Maybe a poem can bring these motivations into the light so that they can be examined. What if fear could be felt and known as the vulnerable emotion that it is, what kinds of knowledge and action might that produce? Maybe the existence of fear would not have to lead to weapons.  

Or the fact that wind in the outback is never a “broken hinge,” not a “crying out,” and how violence can be an act of kindness. The raw power of image….  Words came later, by accident in a silent room at a desk. But back there, one afternoon in that desolate expanse my husband and I and a stranger, the three of us came together over that creature stricken by a fellow human we desperately wanted to disown, a driver hot to desecrate the planet.

“The Telling” took about a month of writing and rewriting, sometimes just making tiny adjustments, sometimes refiguring images, sometimes recalibrating the syntax. I don’t want it to “look” like a melting glacier, but I do want it to suggest some of the processes of diminishment, elision, loss, also endurance, and the massive circular sense of the cyclic nature of things.

Awareness of what we are part of, an element of, an organism within, is essential to knowing oneself and one’s placement. There is duty inherent to place; balance, sustenance, reciprocity, preservation, protection, beingness, belonging to or being a good guest within. Every step taken has impression.

When I was a little girl on the rooftop and daydreamed I conducted an orchestra of trees dancing far away from economic and political crises caused by oil and the air incessantly tousled our hair to the beat of common heart.

Dearest Tre, it is 45 degrees Celsius this afternoon here in the Mojave Desert. I'm missing you, when do you arrive? The intense heat makes things seem further away; how is it doing that? Here is a new poem for you.

In Cree epistemology, land is a sentient being; we are co-constituted with it. A Cree ecopoetics, in my mind, is a poetics of the land, a way of acknowledging the sovereignty of land and water and animal and plant life...

The power of the bird is not only its chirp and trill, but the richness of its name which alters our lips in pronouncing it: albatross, kestrel, blackbird, screech owl...

The metabolism of our bodies is connected to the metabolism of the planet. We transform, reshape, or “write” our environment by polluting it, by changing nutrient flows and biogeochemical cycles. In response, our environment “writes” us...

We consider that creative-artistic activity provides resistance to oppression, because it is from this perspective that we can demonstrate the damage caused to nature, the violence done to the defenders of the environment.

We are both a part of that natural sphere and stand distinctly apart within it, in our creaturely and industrial/technological dominance over it. You are both part of that sphere, and stand painfully apart, with your consciousness, language, cumbersome car and computer.