A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Hillman, Sandra Meek, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Camille T. Dungy, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Hillman, Sandra Meek, & Aimee Nezhukumatathil | September 2020

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Camille T. Dungy, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Hillman, Sandra Meek, & Aimee Nezhukumatathil

In 2018–2019, the UN and the World Meteorological Organization reported that perhaps a decade remains to avert global warming-induced catastrophe. Yet those in the highest positions of power continue to ignore voices warning against our persistent violation of the Earth. Despite the #MeToo movement, discourse surrounding the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings and regarding female public figures, such as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and teenaged-climate activist Greta Thunberg, reveal that public acceptance of misogynist behavior and reluctance to believe women’s testimony persists. While recent scholarship has begun to understand and interrogate the correlation between climate change denial and anti-feminism, incidents such as the cropping out of twenty-three-year-old Ugandan climate activist, Vanessa Nakate, from an Associated Press photo of Nakate and her four fellow activists—all white—at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, underscore how intensified the struggle is for women of color to be heard and, quite literally, seen. In this conversation, five women ecopoets discuss how—in this moment of silencing, violence, and disappearance—their work balances aesthetic and activist concerns, navigating personal and global crises without abandoning wonder for word and world.

Camille T. Dungy’s four books of poetry include Trophic Cascade and Smith Blue. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also authored a book of essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the editor of the ground-breaking anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s many books include Burn, Streaming, Off Season-City Pipe, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, and Effigies III. A 2019 Fulbright Scholar to Montenegro and the 2020 Dan & Maggie Inouye Distinguished Chair in Democratic Ideals, University of Hawai’i at M?noa, she directs the Literary Sandhill Crane Retreat & Festival, and is working on a film. She is a Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside.

Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Practical Water, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, winner of the international Griffin Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days. She has cotranslated At Your Feet by Ana Cristina César. Hillman is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at St. Mary’s College of California.

Sandra Meek is the author of six books of poetry, including Still, An Ecology of Elsewhere, and the Dorset Prize-winning Biogeography. Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, cofounding editor of Ninebark Press, and Dana Professor at Berry College, she has received an NEA Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, three Georgia Author of the Year Awards, and two Peace Corps Writers Awards.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of four books of poetry, including Oceanic, and a book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments. Professor of English in the University of Mississippi’s MFA Program, her honors include a grant from the NEA and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Sandra Meek: We’ve all long been concerned with the natural environment and its devastation—since before “ecopoetry” became a familiar term. We’re now at a political and environmental pivotal point, and I’m wondering how that’s affecting us as women writing ecopoetry. On one hand, we have a president who is climate-change- denier-in-chief; on the other, we have new scientific understanding regarding how short the window is for ameliorating global warming. Also, with the #MeToo movement, women are more and more speaking out about sexual violence. Do you feel this gives power to women to speak and write about ecological violence—or does it somehow “second-tier” the environmental? Do you see any intersection in your work with this movement?

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke: Tanya Tagaq’s Retribution is a prime example of speaking to inextricable violences toward Earth, our mother, toward women/girls while demonstrating the impact of such violence as climate change impact from violent pillaging of fossil fuels. Intersections are apparent in ecological violence and violence against women in each of my books and are running threads, yes, as each existed in my (life and) work early on and continue to hold truths and damage. Again, my feeling is that these elements are inextricable.

Camille T. Dungy: Yes, Allison! These elements are inextricable. As a Black woman, I am intensely aware that violence is violence is violence, and of the fact that violence is more often waged against certain types of bodies. Black literature has long been aware that immediate cultural issues are tied to historical, economic, and environmental issues. The depravities of slavery and white supremacy incite and promote violence upon the land, violence upon nonhuman animals, and violence upon black people and women. All these violences are interconnected and inseparable from the institutions that can only be sustained via such violence.

Maybe with the #MeToo movement other thinkers are catching up to what many Black women writers have long been pointing out. We’re using new language to say the things that some of us have already been saying. We’ve created the term ecopoetry, for instance, to help make space for an environmentally-charged poetic that meditates on the human and the greater-than-human in equal measure. An ecopoetic mindset prefers not to separate demands for social justice from demands for environmental justice. The urgency is real even if the problems, and some of our responses, are not new. Hopefully, new language will help us find new solutions.

Brenda Hillman: I concur with the observations about parallels between violence to the nonhuman and violence to women and people of color. In my ecopoetics class, we discussed the eradication of species and the sense of a corporation as a personal owner—not just of land but also of narratives that often include white supremacy, sexism, and imperialism. So much human history comes from constructing an “other” to attack—people of color, women, nonhuman species; the violence can be subtle and long-term, like spraying chlorpyrifos on strawberries picked by women agricultural workers whose pregnancies are compromised.

If the focus is on relationship, there is less violence. In “ethnopoetics,” the studies of myth and place come into relationship. Humans aren’t the center of the story, nonhuman species are not here to embellish the human. We are one of 8,700,000 species functioning on the planet. I’ve recently written about the American burying beetle—great worker of the underworld, dragging small corpses below ground to feed its young. When I think of that beetle or the Sacramento delta smelt vs. the human dilemma of creating jobs based on scarce resources in those places, I try to remember I’m a white woman with a stable job and my class and race permit a certain approach to environmental anxiety in a particular way because my livelihood is not dependent on the petroleum industry. But regardless of that, the reckless slaughter of individual species should be a reminder that environmental consciousness should not be considered an activity only for the middle class.

Meek: Yes, Brenda—privileging by class, as by gender, is simply another strategy of silencing. While ignorance or lack of empathy—or other motivations—can result in environmental action dismissive of human concerns, an ecopoetic perspective of course foregrounds the interconnection between human and beyond-human nature. A recent UN report states that one million species are on the brink of extinction, and that this has dire implications for human survival. The either/or strategy is not only reductive—it has led us to catastrophe.

I’m currently involved in two research/writing projects with environmental and social justice activists in Belize and Culebra, Puerto Rico; these are not middle-class outsiders but working-class people—fishermen, farmers—who’ve suffered along with their environment because of colonialism and neo-colonialist greed. In Belize, a corrupt dam project left the Maya living along the Macal, who depended on fishing for survival, with a mercury-poisoned river and the loss of their primary means of sustenance; removing the Maya from another part of the forest to make a national park not only devastated the community but made the forest much more vulnerable to poaching—including timber removal. To separate the human and the beyond-human natural world, to see them as a priori adversaries, has dire consequences for both.

Worry isn’t a class privilege; it’s woven deeply into the lives and bodies of the most vulnerable among us. That such worry might be avoided—that’s class privilege. But should the vulnerable—human and otherwise—be left without allies? Again, we’d be left with an either/or situation; as a white middle-class woman, should I not speak out about injustice? Should I not acknowledge my own culpability and write from this awareness? Should we be “good girls,” grateful for what we have, and keep our mouths shut? Who exactly would that silence serve? Certainly not the oppressed, the vulnerable—human or otherwise.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil: You bring up such pressing questions, Sandy—very similar to the very questions I ask of myself when I try to situate myself and my responsibility in writing about the environment. To go back to your original question, I originally didn’t think I could make any connection between the #MeToo movement and the environment. But last year, I was in Tucson to serve as the Arizona Poetry Center’s Writer–in-Residence, and I was reminded there in the creosote air of the slow days I spent growing up in the suburbs of the then not-quite-developed Phoenix. Those were the last years I was truly brave and wild and not looking over my shoulder when I was outdoors. Since then, unsavory and downright scary encounters with men while I jog or walk by myself on nature paths have kept me tied to the outdoors only in conjunction with other people. I do savor those connections with friends and loved ones, of course. But I do love and crave solitude—and solitude in the outdoors is now all too often a luxury for me, I’m afraid.

While in Tucson, I visited the desert museum one morning, and surprised myself and my host when I chose to take the Desert Loop Trail, the longest, the driest trail, with water stations few and far between. According to the signs, that particular hike would take one-and-a-half-hours. I filled up my water bottle and took my first dusty steps towards the saguaro furthest from my horizon. I did tell my host where I was going to be, just in case. On that hike, you could see wily javelinas napping in the shade. Up to that moment, I couldn’t remember the last time I took an hours-long walk anywhere outdoors by myself since I was twenty-two, when two construction workers in Tallahassee once attempted to assault me while I was out jogging in the morning. I was technically able to escape and flee. But is it an escape when more than twenty years later I generally don’t feel safe outside by myself for long stretches of time, like I used to when I was a child and teenager? What else have I missed not being in the woods or following a dragonfly in a creek bed by myself?

Dungy: Aimee, what you speak of seems to be the goal of the kind of anthropocentric, white-dominant, top-down, toxic, “Great Chain of Being” view that gives privilege to some at the expense of others. History proves over and over that one of the great tools of conquest has been to make it unsafe and impossible for most living beings to live their lives comfortably beyond a circumscribed area. Terrify black people about being in the woods, and you can control them and their movements that much easier. Destroy indigenous people’s land and game, and you can control them that much easier. Hunt and trap and shoot wolves and bears and mountain lions, and you make it that much more difficult for those animals to threaten your dominance over the landscape. In many cultures, women have been encouraged to move freely outside, tending and enjoying the “garden” that is all around us if we know how and where to look. Make women afraid to roam beyond their front doors, and you don’t only control them, you control their children and their children’s futures.

I think of organizations like Outdoor Afro, founded by Rue Mapp, as revolutionary. By actively working to reconnect Black people with outdoor activities, she’s disrupting a system that insists Black people have no place in this world and no access to its pleasures. Of course, there have always been those of us who resist these constraints. One of my goals in the anthology Black Nature was to correct the erroneous erasure of Black Americans’ often joyful connection to the greater-than-human world. It is incumbent upon writers to tell stories of refusal and resistance and connection. Some narratives continue to try to erase us, just as toxic masculinity continues to try to control us by terrifying us. But, luckily, enough of us know how to claim our space. We also know how to make space for others—human and beyond-human—to exist in safety and security.

Hillman: Aimee, how wonderful it was to hear about my hometown Tucson. The Sonoran Desert seems strong though it is highly at risk from development and mining interests in the state. I feel deeply about the sense of physical vulnerability you expressed. Bouncing out to the desert as a teenager, despite my mother’s warnings, I ignored the risks, occasionally regretting it, and solitude for women and girls outdoors always feels like a risk.

Camille, your work in Black Nature has been of inestimable value. The anthology has completely revised the nature of “nature” in the canon. I really appreciate what you say about the “garden” assignments being the (often historically male) alternative to wilderness activities for women’s lives—the forms of control this implies. And what you say about how it is “impossible for most living beings to live comfortably beyond a circumscribed area.” When I travel to different countries, I often think about women’s lives, and if there are restrictions, what exactly is being protected, given what the cultural norms are. I’ve experienced gender and age bias in my life, but I acknowledge I have great freedom to move around as a white western woman.

When I experience conflicts between apparent cultural restrictions on freedom of women and what should be “basic human rights” according to my western ethics, I find those things are hard to talk about—especially when it comes to subjects of global concern like women’s health and abortion rights. How can we talk about cultural differences with respect, like the idea that women “belong” only in certain areas of the house or public spaces, the necessity of women’s service to family, etc.? A few years ago, when we were in Africa, I had a moment of sisterly shock about the confines of women’s quarters in a household where only the men were visible. Later, I felt bad that I had taken my western values into the situation.

Sometimes it’s hard to know when to fight on behalf of women—and the environment—and when to say nothing out of respect. I run into this as an activist—this clash. The questions come together: the rights of women, free spaces, and how to define rights to resources. Maybe all this begs the question of whether the nonhuman entities have any “rights” at all when humans are making the rules.

Sometimes it’s hard to know when to fight on behalf of women—and the environment—and when to say nothing out of respect. I run into this as an activist—this clash. The questions come together: the rights of women, free spaces, and how to define rights to resources. Maybe all this begs the question of whether the nonhuman entities have any “rights” at all when humans are making the rules.

Meek: Brenda, I agree and share this struggle; I think western women, especially White Americans, do tend to believe that women living within “traditional” societies are embedded in more sexist social structures and may have less concern for environmental issues than western liberals. My experience living in Botswana as a Peace Corps volunteer first made me realize I’d unconsciously absorbed this “us vs. them” prejudice by growing up in a society (the US) with a colonial mindset, especially as one of the privileged—by race, if not by gender. I’m thinking about how women in Botswana traditionally planted and cared for the fields, how in many parts of Africa traditional market women had more power and autonomy than when western ideas about “women’s work”—as secretaries, bank tellers, etc.—became more the societal norm.

I’m also thinking about Wangari Maathai, Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement; how in her Kikuyu community in Kenya, growing up, girls were told not to collect firewood from strangler fig trees, the oldest and tallest trees in the area, as they were God’s trees. Western missionaries, however, cut them down; this not only severed a spiritual connection between community and environment—the missionaries’ goal—but it also had dire environmental consequences, as those trees’ roots were holding hillsides together, preventing landslides, and preserving the soil. There is such diversity in cultural as well as environmental ecosystems—it’s so important, and challenging, as you say, Brenda, to keep reminding ourselves to see the individual situation and to question our preconceived notions about “others.”

Going back to Aimee’s experience, I think another thing that really varies is how our personal experiences determine where we find safety. Those of us who grew up in unhappy or violent homes, or were bullied, or experienced violence in supposed “safe spaces” such as the church, may have found that isolation in nature, away from other humans, is what provides solace and safety. I grew up in a deeply unhappy home, and the safest I ever felt as a girl-child was outside, alone, at night. As an adult, I feel a deep safety alone in the woods, the desert, the ocean. I was sexually assaulted at sixteen by someone I’d met, but it did not happen outside. I was lucky in that the violence I experienced didn’t taint my experience of the natural world.

Hedge Coke: I’m not sure I feel being in nature is isolation, as much as union. Something of union, the solidarity with planet, is bereft in society, in the society of the States, and that something missing is literally killing us.

In preceding comments related to cultural intersections and imagined oppressions, it is difficult for me to sink my teeth into what rationale would cause such a dichotomy of understanding other than to note that people sometimes have a strange way of viewing all else without seeing a thing.

#MeToo is taking down powerful people, men, in all sorts of positions related to entertainment, including books. Men of varying degrees of perpetration, abusing power within entertainment, including bad passes and bad manners, as well as rape culture and force. While many of us who were brutally beaten, assaulted, raped, hospitalized, left for dead, permanently physically damaged, spine and brain injured, from attacks by far less wealthy figures who attempted to end us are left out of the loop of #MeToo, without recourse in the movement, because our assailants are not economically privileged powerhouses. Instead, those of us assaulted by people who would never be enviable by any reasonable person, are often shamed, mocked for bringing up our truths and pummeled a bit by the seemingly more important. The interesting thing always is that privilege doesn’t stop abuse. It may be constructed differently, as demand for the privilege of privilege or entry into privilege. #MeToo is necessary for that realm; more is necessary, and the issue isn’t a contest of privilege, it is assault.

All of this, again, is integral to what is happening with the assault on the planet, to the ideology of assault.

My recent work with women transitioning from assault, kidnapping, rape, trafficking, is with a formidable union of collaborators, including Tulsa Artist Fellows Laurie Thomas, Jennifer Hope Davy, Liz Blood and DIVIS, Tulsa. The final work was staged, actors performing clients’ monologues, clients whose stories swept over the theater with the grave sense of what assault is and does to a human being. Planetary stories, from galaxies of expansive lives, reminiscent of everything that ever was, held in memory of so many people whipped up on and nearly ended. None of their stories had to do with privilege, and yet all of them did. This thing we are in, this society, if you can call it such, is rampant in perpetration and privilege wielding. It pushes a “survival of the fittest” mentality that oppresses and assaults anything or anyone that seems to be resource to glean, and anyone who requests to share resources.

Look at the asylum seekers caught in the torturous border concentration camp madness by delusions of a powerful perpetrator. The blatant perpetration, including physical, mental, medical, and sexual assault, is ungodly, and here the retort is messianic. Madness, invoked by a person/persons of great wealth and privilege who have set themselves into positions to dismantle all protections of the Earth for the sake of ravaging resourcing despite the human and environmental repercussions of direct assault on humanity and on the natural world. Here, all of this is implicitly tied to the entertainment industry, to game-show mentality intersecting with state power, which #MeToo has no power to derail. In this economic coup, we have been constantly assaulted, strategically assaulted with physiological, physical, and psychological ramifications, with the rise of hatred, of what passes as privilege but is more accurately oppressive assault; we exist in some reality-show melodrama perpetration of government that is not democracy and is not normal.

The monstrous events that are happening are not only frightening and deadly, but may be irreversible in an era the world may not fully recover from, environmentally speaking. This economic coup is an assault on humanity and on the very planet we inhabit—in this sense, diabolical. This brings me to consider how many times this type of assault has occurred and how the planet and her people have suffered. Was it any different during Euro-settlement? During days of conquistadors? During pilgrimages meant to resource others’ homelands in the name of some deity invoked? In each era, destruction and death for the sake of wealth and resourcing. For the sake of power and wielding superiority.

Nezhukumatathil: What I’m hearing from you all is highlighting what I’ve long observed with great sadness: that most colonizers—the people destroying the Earth and making decisions to loosen what little environmental protections we had in place, the people deciding immigration laws and putting humans in cages and separating families with such an unabashed cruelty—are mostly men. This sends a chill up my spine when I think of my own two young (tween) sons. My husband is White and my sons appear to most people as White boys. Because of this, I’d be lying to say I didn’t feel an extra keen responsibility to raise them to be stewards of this planet and to be, in the words of Mr. Rogers, “a good neighbor.” What’s true for me is that for many of my friends who are women of color, the people they fear most when they travel alone are White men. Of course, I’d like to think I’d also be feeling this responsibility if my children looked more like me (with brown skin). But how do I reconcile that awareness with raising what I hope to be kind and gentle white-appearing men in the world, a world my children observe that is so much more fraught and filled with danger—not because it didn’t exist before but because they can see and read about it so easily now.

One of my greatest sadnesses is that the first president either of them will fully remember in action is the current one who has assaulted women, bullied peers, and generally been an abhorrent narcissist. I will never forgive this country for putting such a dishonorable man in that office (so many children were and are watching) and yet it serves as a reminder that I must work harder than ever before to model kindness and respect for other living things on this planet. And to keep tenderness and empathy as something to aspire to, something to work towards every day until it becomes such a natural practice in my boys’ lives, and not seen as a sign of weakness. All these grown men I mentioned above—so intent on destruction and violence and endless power grabs—they were all someone’s child once. They learned this behavior and their seemingly unquenchable thirst for power and violence from someone.

Meek: I wonder if we might talk about our own recent work, how it grapples with environmental and/or gender-based violence, and whether this concern has aesthetic implications for that work?

Hedge Coke: We are on fire.

Burn (2017) is a book-length poem on environmental and gender-based violence. The book features my witnessing and participating first-hand in life within the worst recorded fires in Texas history, “Everything from Tucson to Texas a rage.” It also deals with many fires that have affected my life and the lives of those I love, including my brother’s self-immolation at age eleven, fires caused by arsonists, drought, climate change. It deals with violence to our world and to women and children, specifically. Including deaths and permanent disability all the way through the live essence of the two-month blaze, drawing upon flashback and suturing and coming near conclusion at the “indictment”:

In the burn of your brow, when you hastened, did you think before belting me? Conceive intent? What were you, but burning?

This poem is a testimony of truth in the horror of a beautiful and sacred thing, fire. It represents what we are in while in this world, this state, and under assault and arson. It calls for balance and reckoning, reveal, and for healing. “Burn” is included in Streaming, a larger climate collection (168 pages) and MP3 album also investigating these integral and inextricable realms while seeking balance, truth and restoration.

Hillman: This has been inspiring. I’ve been writing from a feminist perspective for about six decades, so I would say my “recent work” began in the ’80s. I’m still mulling over issues that came out of radical women’s work from that period. At that point, I started seriously thinking about West Coast ecology—the “natural violence” of a geologically turbulent coast-line and environmental violence like dioxin. As a poet-mother-wife-teacher I felt the male nature-writing tradition could use more perspectives from women. I decided to write a feminist eco-epic about the elements, and the four books of that project took a couple of decades. So my most recent book, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, is kind of an extension—a fifth element; a Korean friend asked me to write about wood. It includes poems about forests being a source of mystery but also subject to human violence and it’s also about personal grief and recovery through beauty and consciousness. I don’t think women writers will ever be post-grief.

Women’s experimental poetry has often combated assumptions of dominance and capitalist ideas of progress. Muriel Rukeyser’s legacy has been a growing source of inspiration. Lately I’m less overwhelmed by grief and more energized by the work we have to do together. I’ve returned to the subject of stress: stress in the mind, stress in the landscape. In activist practices I’ve worked with groups that oppose violence to humans and the Earth; sometimes I do little spells to the nonhuman, something I did as a desert child. I’m trying to befriend time because of my aging body, so when I don’t feel helpless despair, as I do about the news from the Amazon, I can summon energy and not fall into tropes of faux-heroic exhaustion. I love thinking about microbiomes. Even if there is destruction and grief, there is also much beauty and wild creation in the human and non-human realms. I have a lot of confidence in the powers of language to resist hopelessness so it feels like such an exciting time for poetry, especially for women’s poetry.

Nezhukumatathil: I’ve just put the finishing touches on a forthcoming illustrated collection of nature essays that draw attention to plants and animals that aren’t usually found in textbooks, websites, and podcasts. In fact, several of these species are endangered or on the brink of extinction. And because the inhabitants of this world are connected like Pando—one of the largest aspen tree colonies in the world (which serves as a metaphor and a vocabulary for this collection)—I believe we can still right the wrongs in our personal lives, in our communities, and in the natural world.

With this prose collection, I hope to call readers to become and to remain students of the natural world and to celebrate the heartbeats and beautiful noises and silences we have on this planet. I’ve felt this pull long before I became a mother, by visiting elementary classrooms to teach kids how to write nature poems, and now with my sons, I feel the immediacy on a daily basis: I’m constantly searching for ways to connect and nurture future generations with a deep appreciation and awe of nature and its importance in giving children a robust sense of place and belonging. Rachel Carson’s reminder that “[t]he more clearly we focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction,” seems needed now more than ever to encourage a new sense of gentleness towards our planet, and towards each other.

Dungy: I love being in conversation with you all, here and through our writing. I recently published an essay, “Losing Language” (Emergence Magazine), that quotes Allison in the epigraph: “What we need are tear leaders, not cheer leaders. We need tear leaders to teach us how to mourn.” I first heard Allison say that more than ten years ago, and the question of how writers can serve in this and other roles continues to resonate with me. How can we help ourselves and others formulate the thoughts we need to be thinking in order to survive? That’s a key question in my work.

My most recent poetry collection, Trophic Cascade, intertwines supposedly domestic concerns with global and environmental ones. I don’t believe these to be things we can separate. The book makes clear my resistance to such delineations. The title poem, for instance, uses that story about the reintroduction of grey wolves to Yellowstone to speak of the ways that one creature can change everything around it. The poem feels for a significant time like it is going to dwell entirely in that space we call “the environment,” as if the environment doesn’t include the human. But it ends thus:

Don’t you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this life born from one hungry animal, this whole, new landscape, the course of the river changed, I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same

I wonder often how violence toward our planetary cohabitants (like the grey wolf) might equate with violence toward women and children, particularly the Black woman and Black girl child at the center of this book. How might a loving and sustaining embrace positively shape the ways we are able to survive?

My concerns about violence (and care) have aesthetic implications. These concerns are one of the driving forces of my entire poetics. “Trophic Cascade” is shifted to the right margin because I needed to see the poem differently, to notate on the page the ways that a new life, or a newly protected life, might change everything about how we come to the familiar. On the page, I want to incorporate disruption and renewal both in terms of formal constructs such as lineation, pagination, rhythm, image, and capitalization, and in terms of the subject/content of the poems. Because these poems do deal so frequently with concerns that are coded as feminine (childbirth, child rearing, elder care, mourning the loss of elders), and because they are written out of my own Black American experience, cultural violence and exclusion (and also resistance to these) are inscribed as part of the very DNA of the poems’ forms, content, and intentions.

Meek: My most recent book, Still, celebrates vulnerable natural wonders—winnow ants’ “copper baubles spider-wired / to filigree”; the “cabbed gembones” of the eyes of Galapagos’ marine iguanas; Caribbean reef squids’ “arms flash-flowering to star // anemone”—as it reckons with environmental, colonial, and sexual violence in poems that are sometimes in persona, and sometimes quite personal. Still also confronts the difficult truth that while travel—so central to my life and work—allows empathetic connection to the natural world, it’s also destructive to that world. In confronting the violation of home, whether that be body, family, culture, or our shared natural world, Still, I hope, gives voice and image not only to what is in danger of being forever stilled, but also to the marvel of survival. This, I believe, is something all five of us remain deeply committed to in our work.

Excerpt

Trophic Cascade
by Camille T. Dungy

After the reintroduction of gray wolves
to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling of
deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt
of the mid century. In their up reach
songbirds nested, who scattered
seed for underbrush, and in that cover
warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew
returned, also vole, and so came soon hawk
and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them
hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade
and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried
runnels where deer no longer rummaged, cautious
as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves.
Berries brought bear, while undergrowth and willows,
growing now right down to the river, brought beavers,
who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.
Came, too, the night song of the fathers
of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark
gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools
of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who
fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps
came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region
until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more
trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river
that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,
compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed,
I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time
a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.

 

(Reprinted from Trophic Cascade, Wesleyan University Press: 2017)

Cedar Behavior: encyclopedic entry unavailable
For Travis
by Alison Adelle Hedge Coke

Tremble in cedar bough, steady, soft,
shake neither of us knew still
we speculated squirrel, owl, woodpecker
until the shake grew wilder, rough.

I circled, while you waited
no clue gave way to reason until
just like that, cedars on either side
leaned back like humans, then sprung
forward fast arduous toward trembling
center
releasing pollen
in mesmerizing green cloud, fully permeating space
surrounding this trio, while the trembler eased
back into herself still and shattered
what we thought we knew of trees.

 

(Printed with permission from Allison Adelle Hedge Coke)

SLIGHTLY LESS STRESSFUL WALK UP HILL
by Brenda Hillman

How do you hope to survive?
& not just that: was it even the question? By midday the fog was burning off;;
screech & call beside the anyway::: ::: the parent osprey
had gone out looking for the right fish
(did it fear stone?) & bryophytes rested on the soil
as the soul might rest on the what ifs—;
you were trying not to waste poetry’s time on stupid questions,
all the you’s going along out there tired
getting through meetings—
never enough sleep even if you nap at the office—
checking the phone tiny electrons of joy,
messages from large specific you, small specific you,,
large general you,
pressure filled colleagues
whose healing had not occurred but still might...
Tech certainly hadn’t helped; chlorpyrifos;;—
cities eking out funds, people sleeping in tents
with black & white dogs & children;
racist prisons— you’re getting numb to the list— “growth
in the service sector—”
women working three jobs— production of power
& that tone in the profit voices when you call customer service
growing slightly more officious suspecting the next “downturn”—
you wake with nano-minutes of stress built up overnight—
offshore breezes, fear of fires—
mosses bunched , , , ,,, , , , ,,, , near the small oaks (did they fear stone?)
Women had experimented for centuries with too much cortisol —
so, what to do now, since doing was the problem— It was just
mainly important to get through the day
with the minutes moving roundly, rather than lengthwise—
Surely one note could be singled out
—for example ::: ::: the screech of the baby osprey,
& the nest waiting, heavy with proudlings —;
perhaps a calm could be entered (like cooked fog
or a monarch butterfly coming through looking like John Clare
across the enclosures—)
,,, on the other side of the highway steel tubes of dairy trucks
were grinding along—
the milk sloshing inside
& besides that the hope of
the circular spirits bringing a map of formless order
where a legendary love was taking place, beyond control
for MW

(From Ploughshares, Spring 2020)

The Body
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Something poisons the sea stars
in the Pacific. They rip themselves apart,
twist their arms in gummy knots.
The arms just walk away from the body:
the pull, the pull—what a stroll—until the arms
detach entirely and spill their creamy innards
onto the ocean floor. I want to do that with my arms—
maybe just my left one—the one that keeps
reaching back to your yellow house
and those slow summers when we grilled out
almost every night. I want to pull off my arm,
or maybe just a finger, or three, so I don’t point
to the playground where our blue dog jumped
through the rows of swings that still squeak
their mild annoyance from each slobbery leap
they endured. Maybe I just want to rid myself
of knuckles so I can’t knock on the door you now share
with another—just so I can see her sweet, blank face—
so I can laugh and say, Sorry, sorry: wrong house!
Forgive me, I am nothing but a thumbnail. Yes—that’s
what I’d get rid of—my nail now blackened
with each thump of a sentence. See how
I accidentally brought you up again
when I picked up this nail, this hammer?

(Originally published in Oceanic, Copper Canyon Press 2020)

Still, with Judas Goats
Project Isabela, Galápagos
by Sandra Meek

Selection began the terror: how I loved
my new necklace, His glittering noosed ear
always upon me. When He came first
from the sky, when He slipped

the hood over my horns, stood me
onto my shoulders, I felt a sting,
a clip, a brightness distancing
my body. As what had quickened in me

stilled in His hands, I knew He couldn’t bear
to share me. Shot with the needle
dripping unending desire of others
for me, didn’t I dutifully draw

my kind from their caves, making again
our little society? Forgive me, those days I almost
forgot Him. When the five-bladed sky
powered its seraphimed shadow

upon us, how we ran, I
with them—the ones who’d mounted
me, the little ones racing still
for their mothers’ teats—how they dropped

to their knees, their legs snapped
broomsticks, leaves still spun from the glossy
corners of their mouths, their fur
glistening with rain-sleek roses, lipsticked kisses

blown from their bodies. But wasn’t I
the beloved, the one left, taken again
under His wing, until it all again
began? How many times this occurred

is beyond my measure. Finally, I could gather
only those like me, the startled girls,
each of us taken in to believe we were
The One. We knew each other

by our war-slicked eyes, the echo
of our sutured, future-emptied bodies,
how we each wore the charm of His listening
around our neck. And no more

did the sky empty upon us, no more
did He come for us; the grass grew lush
under our few hooves, for we did not
increase, and the great ones who had long

withered inside their domed shells
began again to move among us.
The ones we now knew all
had been done for, though we were left

freely to eat what we would, what would have fed
so many lost we’d led. O God
in the Whirling Machine, didn’t we well
bring your weather down?

Now we bow our heads only
to the recovering green.

(From Still, Persea Books: 2020)