On Trees, Home, and Mimicry

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When I start writing these notes, it’s at the end of a long semester. The temperature has dropped; the trees in Lincoln are mostly bare now, though some still stubbornly cling to clumps of brown, shriveled leaves. On my walk through campus on the way to work each day, I’ve been watching the squirrels building their winter nests out of those leaves. It’s finals week, and campus is going through yet another shift. The English department building is suddenly quiet without the steady stream of students going to classes. In the library, students are hunched over books and laptops as they finish final papers and study for exams. It makes me think of my own undergraduate semesters—writing papers on Virginia Woolf or Milton, cramming for a Russian test, or anxiously memorizing the dental patterns of lemurs, gibbons, and Old World monkeys for a physical anthropology final.

*

As I jump back into these notes, there are about 1,000 miles between myself and Lincoln. It’s Christmas Eve; I’m at my childhood home in Pennsylvania, where the temperature has warmed, causing fog to fill the small valley where our house sits. Above us, the mountains are encased in fog. My dad keeps checking the webcams at the ski resorts there, hoping that it will clear so he can drive up to burn some energy for a few hours. But the camera images remain a white blur.

*

I don’t know the names for all the different trees and shrubs along the path on my way to school in Nebraska, but I know what they look like as the seasons change. How the one near my building bursts in the spring with tight clusters of white blossoms resembling cake frosting. Nearby, lilac bushes face each other on either side of the walkway; when they bloom in April, I pause to stuff my face in them each time I pass by.

There’s one tree on campus that is in its own category, and that is Roxy Paine’s 40-foot stainless steel tree sculpture, which is nestled among other natural trees beside Andrews Hall. I see it in passing moments now—on my way to get coffee, or to pick up a book from the library. But in my second year here, I had an office that looked out directly onto the tree.

In the summer, the tree’s trunk and limbs merge with the canopy; one must seek it out to know it's there. In winter, the sculpture is starkly radiant one day, glowing against Nebraska's bright-blue sky, and muted and hidden the next, blending in with the bare trees around it. In the fall, red leaves from a nearby tree throw their color against its metal trunk, mimicking firelight. The trunk is thick; the limbs are spidery and reaching. People pass by it every day never seeing it, but once they do, it’s difficult for one’s eyes to not be drawn to it.

The branches of Paine’s tree were constructed in his studio in upstate New York. I learned this after having stared at the tree through my office window for the better part of a year and a half. Paine’s studio and home are in Treadwell, NY—a hamlet in the town of Franklin in Delaware County, not far from Syracuse, where I lived before moving to Nebraska. Google Maps tells me that Treadwell is a one hour and 53 minute drive from Syracuse via I-81 S, which I drove regularly on my way to visit my parents in Pennsylvania.

*

After a semester ends, there is often a relief, for me, in looking up from my books and computer and remembering that, among other things, trees still exist. At the end of the fall semesters, I would usually come home to my parent’s house for the winter break. The house sits along a two-lane highway at the edge of the woods; I can walk into my back yard and climb up into those tree-lined hills, where I will never get lost. Or I can drive a few miles down the highway to the state park, where hiking trails I once worked on cut their way through hills, streams, and waterfalls.  Arriving here from a city, the air always feels crisp and clean. I can smell the pine in it clearly.

*

Paine’s work explores interactions between what is natural and what is artificial. Prior to the installation of the UNL tree (titled “Breach”), a news release said of Paine’s work:

[The trees] are placed in contexts where they are at once integral and apart, calling attention to how the surrounding landscapes—while apparently natural—are likewise human interventions. The Sheldon tree, unlike Paine's other trees, will appear scarred, perhaps damaged by lightning or high wind, and suggests the impact of history while retaining a pristine surface. Its placement is important to Paine, who seeks to engage viewers by presenting an unexpected form in association with the objects it mimics.

I have spent six years in the building beside this tree, as a graduate student in English. In my first years in the program, I found myself relating to the tree’s way of blending in, mimicking the trees around it. I thought of myself performing a similar kind of mimicry, having shifted from year-round farm labor to being immersed once more in academia.

Now I am nearing the end of my PhD program and find myself relating to the sculpture in a different way. Silver has gathered in streaks in my hair, matching the trunk and limbs. Like the tree, I’m feeling a little weathered, my branches a little broken. But still standing.

*

Outside the window of my childhood bedroom in Pennsylvania, I see another tree. It’s on our neighbor’s property; I don’t know what species it is, or if it’s alive or dead. But in the cold December rainlight, its limbs appear as silver as the limbs of Roxy Paine’s tree. This is the room where I wrote my first poems. It’s now my mom’s artist studio. There’s something beautiful in that, I think: the two of us, at different points in life, sitting inside this same room and making art.

*

Coming home always sends me into a reflective state, whether I want it to or not. I end up thinking a lot about identity and how it’s shaped by people and place. Many of my friends agree that going home makes them revert, in some way, to a previous version of themselves. With time and distance, I’ve shifted away from the person I was when I started writing poems in this room. But to revisit a place can also be to revisit a self, and when I enter this house, I feel some kind of swap taking place inside my body. Maybe this is also a kind of mimicry. I think it comes from a place of wanting to reassure my loved ones here that I haven’t changed so much that they can’t recognize me. It’s still me, this shadow-self whispers. And there can be delight in revisiting that past self. And it can also feel strange—like a kind of erasure.

*

In the airport on my way back to Lincoln, yet another shift inside myself. Airports make me feel blank, anonymous. With an hour to spare in between flights, I spray perfume at a duty free store, buy a book of poetry at the bookstore (Lindsey Webb’s Plat). At boarding time, I wedge my hips into a too-small window seat and think about how good it will feel to hold my cat, who my neighbor says has been crying at the door when she comes home from work. Clouds and fog cover Lincoln—so thick that I don’t see the ground until we’re just about to land. When it appears, I’m relieved to see the long expanse of a dirt field, a straight dirt road cutting through it. Something unfurls inside my chest. This, too, is home.

Reading/Listening Notes: Reconnecting with Music in the Streaming Age

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I’ve never been a musician (aside from a handful of unfortunate years struggling to play the flute in the school concert band), but music has always been important to me. My earliest memories of music are of playing 45’s of The Beatles and Mason Williams’ “Classical Gas” on a plastic Fisher-Price record player. My dad’s record collection is extensive: hundreds of albums meticulously taken care of and stored, incongruously, in a bathroom closet. Sometimes he would have me pick one to play, and I’d spend a long time standing in front of the closet, pulling out albums to look at the cover art, stopping once I got to one I liked.

One example: King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, the cover art of which my mom once painted onto a sweatshirt that has since disappeared. The artwork was painted by Barry Godber, a computer programmer and friend of King Crimson co-founder Peter Sinfield. In the Court was Godber’s only album cover, and according to band member Robert Fripp, the only painting he ever made; he died at 24 from a heart attack, just four months after the album was released. Fripp, in a 1995 interview, says that “The face on the outside is the Schizoid Man, and on the inside it's the Crimson King. If you cover the smiling face, the eyes reveal an incredible sadness. What can one add? It reflects the music.”

Over the years, I’ve drifted away from the physical part of music. Streaming playlists have replaced CDs and records. Cabinet speakers have been swapped for a tiny Bluetooth speaker which I always forget to charge. Spotify algorithms dictate much of what I listen to, making the consumption of music less mindful. Less physical. As is the case for many things these days, I’ve felt a loss of connection to music.

When I was younger—before cell phones, when the internet existed but didn’t overshadow our lives—playing music was an activity itself. I would thumb through a stack of CDs, take the disc out of the plastic jewel case with a satisfying pop, then page through the album booklet as the first notes played. In my twenties, living in a small apartment in Pittsburgh, I started my own vinyl collection. I’d spend afternoons lost in Jerry’s Records in Squirrel Hill, home to half a million albums and owned, at the time, by Jerry himself. I fell more deeply in love with music and the physicality of it: running my fingers across the album spines. Smelling the vinyl as I took it out of the thin paper sleeve. Setting the stylus on the turntable and cleaning the dust from the record as it spins. That first crackle as the needle is lowered to the groove.

In looking at my relationship to music in recent years, I realize that the time and attention I used to give it has waned; it’s turned into something I mindlessly consume in brief spaces within a flurry of other activities. Real connection requires real attention, and I have not been mindful with my attention towards a lot of the things I love these days. I’ve missed going to a record store and spending hours looking through the used CD’s, jumping with excitement when I find something I’d been looking for. And I miss listening to an album the whole way through, flipping through the booklet of artwork and song lyrics.

Album cover for XTC’s Apple Venus Volume I

This is how I’ve come to find myself sitting on the floor of my living room every night in front of the space where my TV used to sit—a space now occupied by my turntable (which I’ve had in storage for the last six years), an old CD player, a couple of thrift store speakers, and a receiver that I bought from a man on Marketplace whose living room wall featured a calendar full of tanned, oily, bikini-clad women. Gradually, I’ve been building my CD collection again. Fortunately, Lincoln has a surprisingly good roster of record stores selling vinyl as well as used CD’s, and I’ve spent hours in them now, looking through the spines of jewel cases for familiar titles. I’ve found old favorites that I haven’t listened to in years, like XTC’s Apple Venus Volume I, a weird and gorgeous album that isn’t available on Spotify. The album is bookended by two of my favorite moments in music. The first is the intro to “River of Orchids,” which opens with a growing cascade of dripping sounds and plucked orchestra strings which are eventually joined by horns before the lyrics finally enter. The second comes at the end of “The Last Balloon,” when Andy Partridge holds a long vocal note that morphs seamlessly into a flugelhorn before finishing the song out as a horn solo. I forgot how good music could sound when it’s not being played out of a pair of cheap and easily broken earbuds, or out of the aforementioned mediocre Bluetooth speaker.

I titled this “Reading Notes,” and I’m getting to that. Because as I’ve started collecting CDs and looking through my vinyl again, I’m also rediscovering the care that is put into the packaging of these albums. How, often, CD booklets and vinyl sleeves represent a collision between visual art, music, lyrics, poetry, and ephemera. Take, for example, the CD booklet for Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele, which features a photo of Amos cradling a four-day-old pig that she appears to be nursing—a photo so controversial that UK versions of the album’s songbook were released without it. Or look at Pearl Jam’s packaging for their 1996 album No Code, which folds out to reveal a compartment containing individual Polaroid-style photos with handwritten song lyrics scrawled on the back. Or their 1994 album, Vitalogy, which includes a booklet filled with different ephemera and artwork—diagrams, pages of glossaries and indexes from old books, collages. One page, which includes the lyrics for “Whipping,” features a petition letter addressed to President Clinton expressing outrage over the murder of Dr. David Gunn, a physician who was shot and killed in 1993 for providing abortions in Pensacola, Florida.

Tori Amos, Boys for Pele

Pearl Jam, No Code

Pearl Jam, Vitalogy

Songbooks sometimes resemble chapbooks or zines, containing stories or history about the music, artists, or artwork. One example: a 2006 reissue of Karen Dalton’s 1971 album In My Own Time, which includes reflections and mini-essays about Dalton by musicians Nick Cave, Lenny Kaye, and Devendra Banhart. Lenny Kaye, quoting Lacy J. Dalton (who Kaye says “took her last name from Dalton, to honor the unspoken student-teacher bond the two developed), writes:

What she was, in the end, was a harbinger of our despair, a “canary in a coal mine,” as Lacy puts it, one of those who see “the sorrow of what man does to man and the planet, the acute awfulness which is sometimes too much for sensitive souls. Karen loved the earth, as a Native American, a woman, a queen, a pagan mother goddess rooted in this planet, and she was so desolate about what we were doing to it.”

Karen's response was not to shout. Lacy remembers her hands as being soft, weathered, as expressive as her voice. “Why do you think you have to sing so loud?” Karen once asked her. “If you want to be heard, you have to sing softer.”

Listen close. 

I’ll end here with a short and certainly non-exhaustive list of albums that, in addition to the ones mentioned here, I think are worthy of attention, of sitting still and listening the whole way through. They are in no particular order. Some of them I think of as “perfect” albums, but only in the sense that the most perfect things in this world are perfect for their having some sort of beautiful imperfection. Happy listening:

  • Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel is Wiser…

  • Noname - Telefone

  • Harumi - Harumi

  • Beverly Glenn-Copeland - Keyboard Fantasies

  • Patti Smith - Horses

  • Santana - Santana

  • Christine McVie - The Legendary Christine McVie Perfect Album

  • Andrew Bird - Echolocations: Canyon

  • Feist - Metals

  • A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders

  • Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

  • Tracy Chapman - Tracy Chapman

  • Sharon Van Etten - Are We There

  • PJ Harvey - To Bring You My Love

  • Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears

  • Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - 100 Days, 100 Nights

  • Aimee Mann - Mental Illness

  • Lhasa De Sela - Lhasa

Reading Notes: Poets Writing Prose

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As a poet who, lately, has been increasingly drawn toward essay writing, and as someone with a deep and lasting fascination with place, I really enjoyed this recent essay, “The Essay as Realm,” by Elisa Gabbert. Something I always love about her work is the way she talks about reading—and she reads widely, in this case bringing a discussion of architecture books into her consideration of the essay. I always come away from her pieces having added several books to my to-read list.

“An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place,” Gabbert writes. “It has to give one the feeling of entering a room.” My favorite essays, I think, are ones that feel like entering many rooms all at once. First I am in the kitchen, the tea kettle whistling; then, suddenly, I’m in the living room where an old box television has just been clicked off, the screen still giving off static. I don’t remember walking through the doorway, but I don’t question my new surroundings, and I know the tea will still be warm when I come back to it.

I read Gabbert’s essay while also reading Eavan Boland’s 1995 book Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet In Our Time, a prose collection which recollects her early origins as a poet. Boland is also fixated on place, examining questions of nationhood as she grapples with her identity as not just a poet, but also an Irish woman. In her preface, she writes that she has constructed the book “not as a prose narrative is usually constructed but as a poem might be: in turnings and returnings.” She goes on:

Therefore, the reader will come on the same room more than once: the same tablecloth with red-checked squares; the identical table by an open window. An ordinary suburb, drenched in winter rain, will show itself once, twice, then disappear and come back. The Dublin hills will change color in the distance, and change once more. The same October day will happen, as it never can in real life, over and over again.

This insistence on return first occurs as she describes the room where she was first caught up in poetry—a study where she was learning Latin. Here is her description of the room:

The study where I worked was a somber room, with a scarred oval table and two armchairs. There were embroideries on the armrests, a bookshelf with just a few paperbacks leaning crookedly against one another. And a bay window. A wireless with a dial and a coarsely woven front grid stood on a lamp table in the corner. Under the window was a eucalyptus tree, a glittering exhibition which distracted me when the sea winds came in with the spring light behind them.

Boland also says, of the room: “I see myself there, more than I do in other places.” Reading this, I thought long and hard about memory, identity, and about the places I most often see myself—such as a bedroom in on the third floor of a house that I shared with five other girls in Pittsburgh, a balcony attached to it opening up to a perfect view of the downtown city skyline over which the sky blazed orange and red with sunsets most nights. I think of this room first, perhaps, because it’s the room where I started to take myself seriously as a poet—printing pages of my poems out to show my professor, writing for long stretches in a notebook in bed while incense burned on the dresser. 

But more often, it’s not a room I place myself in—it’s a field, or the woods, some landscape that has left its imprint on me. In Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez writes about the interior landscapes we hold within us, writing that “the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.” I found myself talking about this recently after being asked about the significance of landscape—and, in particular, the landscape of the field—in my poetry. It’s something I’m still considering.

It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that much of my favorite prose has been written by poets. What I loved most about Eavan Boland’s Object Lessons is the way it develops like a poem—as she said in the preface, she was guided by “turnings and returnings,” which I find to be a beautifully succinct way of summing up some of the magic of what poems can do.

Here are a few other books/essays from poets that I’ve admired, a nonexhaustive list:

  • The Crying Book by Heather Christle: a gorgeous blending of personal and researched reflections on tears, and which feels deeply guided by Christle’s poetic sense of associative leaps

  • throughsmoke by Jehanne Dubrow: a book-length essay written in lyrical notes, reflecting on perfume and scent

  • “Assymetrical Lines” by Katie Marya: a recent essay, and another beautiful blending of the personal with the critical. Take this first line: “I started thinking about asymmetrical lines in poetry around the same time I started thinking about having a child.”

  • S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt: I wrote about this book more extensively in a previous post, but I’ll mention it again here because it is such a stunning example of the merging of poetry and prose. The collection has been out of print for some time, but it’s about to be republished by Sinister Wisdom.

Writing Notes: On Writing Practice

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Some recent conversations with fellow writers have left me thinking about writing practices—mine, theirs, the overlaps and the in-betweens. I know writers who have created beautiful, devoted rituals around their writing; they wake every morning at 5:00 a.m. and spend those first dark hours of the day with a pen and notebook, or they sit down after breakfast with a fresh cup of coffee, a candle burning. And I know writers who don’t mean to write every day, but seemingly can’t help themselves, scribbling poems in the margins of books, jotting lines down on napkins or in the Notes app on their phone.

I’m not the type of writer who sits down at a desk at a certain time every day and tries to churn something out. I respect those kinds of writers—I see the benefit of the daily practice, making writing a habit, building the muscle memory of the image, the line, narrative. My writing comes in spurts and bursts; I go through long periods of drought in which no poems arrive. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown more comfortable in these periods of silence. I know that the poems, eventually, will come.

I’ve also stumbled upon other writers who have successfully busted the myth of “writer’s block” for me. I especially love this essay by Carl Phillips, which considers the role of silence for writers, and this part in particular:

I once asked Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet for whom there are typically many years between books of poems, how she handled the silence, what I still thought of at the time as writer’s block. “That’s not how I think of it,” she responded, and went on to explain to me how a snake, in order to attack, must first recoil to establish a position from which to attack. As I understand the analogy, the attack is the act of writing, and the period of recoil, of retraction, is many things: reflection, thinking, revision of thought, remembering. “You’re not blocked,” Ellen told me. “You’re waiting. You’re paying attention.” Which is also research. Also, a version of silence, the only sound the sound of a snake breathing, which must be, as sounds go, a soft, a small one.

I love this emphasis on paying attention, making those periods of silence meaningful. Earlier in the piece, Phillips writes “I think that’s all art is, a record of interior attention paid.” When I teach creative writing, it’s with this in mind. We spend the first weeks of the semester doing things like keeping audio journals, smelling perfumes, visiting the campus art museum. As we move toward the page, it’s with a sharpened understanding of what attention means, and how our senses inform our experience and memory.

I’m a collector at heart. I love the process of gathering things—books, photos, notebooks, ephemera, perfume. It occurs to me now that this practice of collecting is also a practice of attention. There’s a desire to keep these things close to me, to hold them in some way.

That practice of collecting spills over into my writing life. I’ve come to think of my own daily writing practice as cataloging—gathering material for the moment when the need to write hits me. I do this in a few ways, most of them having to do with a rotating set of notebooks. Here are the notebooks I currently keep:

 
 

Daily journal: a medium-sized journal, this is where I put thoughts, feelings, anxieties, what I did that day, little observations, things people said. I return to these journals if I’m trying to write about a particular memory or period of time, sometimes mining the pages for details.

Poem notes: a smaller notebook, one that might fit in a pocket, I think of this as my “on the go” book where I write line fragments, pieces of language that caught my attention, ideas for poems or essays, images that stand out to me, quotes from something I’m reading, notes from poetry readings or art galleries, etc.

 
 

Word journal: Another smaller journal, I use this to keep lists of words I come across while reading—words that are interesting, beautiful, strange, etc. This becomes a major generative tool for me when I sit down to write. I use it often when I’m stuck in the middle of writing a poem, at which point I’ll browse through the words, looking for something that leaps out at me, then challenge myself to include that word in the next line of the poem. It’s a small enough constraint that gets the creative gears turning again.

 
 

Poem journal: The largest of the journals, this is one I use to copy out poems which struck me, ones I want to spend more time with. I love the practice of slowly copying each word of the poem, savoring them as I go, thinking closely about the way the lines work together and how the poem moves. Here’s a page where I copied one of Michael Burkard’s “Untitled” poems—one which I’ve realized I copied at least twice into the same journal:

 
 

In addition to the written journals, I also keep an audio journal, which I’ll write about at length another time.

Finally, on the subject of writing practice, here are some books/essays I often return to:

 
 

  • bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. In particular, the first essay in the collection (“Writing From the Darkness”) is a brilliant piece about diary-keeping as a tool for self-discovery and self-recovery. hooks writes: “However much the realm of diary-keeping has been a female experience that has often kept us closeted writers, away from the act of writing as authorship, it has most assuredly been a writing act that intimately connects the art of expressing one’s feeling on the written page with the construction of self and identity, with the effort to be fully self-actualized” (5).

  • Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook.” This one seems obvious, but I can’t go without mentioning it. Here’s a favorite bit: “See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there”

  • Ted Kooser, The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book. This is less a reflection on a writing practice and more an example of what one practice of journal-keeping might look like—in this case, a sequence of short observational prose pieces organized by month. In the preface, Kooser writes, “I know from years of experience that keeping a journal is like taking good care of one’s heart.”

  • Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey. Oh, Mary Ruefle. How I adore the way you think. I love this bit from the title essay, which brings me back to Phillips’ thoughts on attention: “Recently I found myself filling out a grant application by writing: ‘I seek an extended period of time, free from all distractions, so that I might be free to be distracted.’ Distraction is distracting us from distraction. Perhaps we wish to be distracted by the slightest nuances of being, thinking, feeling, or seeing” (137).

Reading Notes: S/HE by Minnie Bruce Pratt

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It’s October, and the weather in Nebraska is seesawing - temperature in the 40’s and 50’s at night, the 80’s and 90’s in the afternoon. The ups and downs have left my body in a state of confusion which has started to infiltrate my sleep. As I write this, it’s 4:28 a.m. A family of raccoons is squabbling on the roof above my bedroom, and I have turned the light on, finally, after failing to sleep through the noise of their shrieks and stumbles—noises which have inspired my cat, Goose, to engage in a round of tail-chasing across the bed, his small but dense body a cyclone across the sheets. There’s no use in trying to sleep more now, so I pick up a book from the wobbly pile stacked high on the nightstand: Minnie Bruce Pratt’s 1995 essay collection, S/HE, a book which I finished weeks ago, but have been carrying around with me ever since.

What can I say about this stunning, singular book? I want to start with the fact that Minnie Bruce was my teacher for a short time, at the end of my MFA program in Syracuse, NY, when I took an intensive two-week spring course on creative nonfiction with her. I remember that her classroom was a space where students felt compelled to bring in pieces of the natural world. A small box with a fragile snakeskin was passed around one morning, plucked from a classmate’s yard. Another day, someone brought in a few clumsy tulips that had been cut and discarded in a nearby garden. For the remainder of the class, they sat on the floor in the center of the room in a small plastic cup filled with water, our desks in a circle around it. Somewhere on my phone, I have a blurry photo I snapped of the flowers, Minnie Bruce at the top of the frame, a half-eaten apple in one hand, a thick stack of papers on her desk.

At the end of the two weeks, she emailed us to thank us for our work, including a video of Mercedes Sosa singing “Gracias a la Vida,” as well as a transcription of both the Spanish lyrics and an English translation. The last verse of the song goes:

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me laughter and it gave me tears.
With them I distinguish happiness from pain
The two elements that make up my song,
And your song, as well, which is the same song.
And everyone’s song, which is my very song.

Most of my other interactions with Minnie Bruce came when she would stop by the used bookstore where I worked for a couple of winters in Syracuse. Once, as I was contemplating applying for another graduate degree at the University of Nebraska, she told me about a trip she had taken to Nebraska, where she stayed in a big house (in my memory, the house was located near Red Cloud, but this was long enough ago that I may be inventing that part). A huge lightning storm came through the night she stayed, thunder and wind shaking the foundation of the house. “It was like no storm I had ever experienced,” she said.

Now, back to the book. S/HE has been on my to-read pile for years now, but it’s sadly been out of print for some time (although, fortunately, it appears that Sinister Wisdom will be republishing it this December as part of their Sapphic Classics series). It’s a collection of essays that only a poet could write: brief, lyrical vignettes that cradle emotion and vulnerability like precious jewels. Take this passage, which on my library copy is excerpted on the back cover:

Desire is like a poem. The knife can mean death and life, but whose hand holds it? The rose can mean petals and canker in the bud, but whose hand spreads it? With each criss-crossing gesture the meaning of lust will shift. If we dare claim our lives as our own, we must read all the poems we write with our bodies.

The book opens with the essay “Gender Quiz,” its title referring to the compulsory quiz that Pratt and many others took in high school, “with its two ways to answer, its two ways to turn: straight or gay, heterosexual or queer.” She traces her origins as a woman growing up in the south, coming into her sexuality in a place where homosexuality was criminalized (Pratt lost custody of her two children after divorcing from her first marriage in a state where a “crime against nature” statute criminalized homosexual activity; this later became the subject of her 1990 collection, Crime Against Nature). As she recounts memories of coming into her queer identity, she begins questioning and complicating the narratives of gender and sexuality which dominated for so long. Describing a visit home in which she introduced her new love to her first girlfriend, she writes, “I was learning that I was more complicated than I’d had any idea. I was beginning to pull the thread of who I was out of the tangle of words: woman and lesbian, femme and female.” A little later, she writes:

No one had turned to us and held out a handful of questions: How many ways are there to have the sex of girl, boy, man, woman? How many ways are there to have gender—from masculine to androgynous to feminine? Is there a connection between the sexualities of lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, between desire and liberation? No one told us: The path divides, and divides again, in many directions. No one asked: How many ways can the body’s sex vary by chromosomes, hormones, genitals? How many ways can gender expression multiply—between home and work, at the computer and when you kiss someone, in your dreams and when you walk down the street? No one asked us: What is your dream of who you want to be?

S/HE is remarkable for its complex considerations of gender, the body, and sexuality, but also for the tenderness with which Pratt recounts her experiences. She ends the first essay by naming the waves of social change in the United States that she has witnessed, writing that the theories developed by each have “complicated our questions about the categories of race, sex, gender, sexuality, and class,” advancing “our ability to struggle against oppressions that are imposed and justified using these categories.” But theory, Pratt states, is not enough, writing that “we can not move theory into action unless we find it in the eccentric and wandering ways of our daily life. I have written the stories that follow to give theory flesh and breath.”

And flesh and breath are where these pieces are rooted. The body is so gorgeously present throughout the book, all of the senses tuned in to the experience of memory. This is especially the case near the center of the book, where the essays suddenly turn to a direct address, beginning with this beautiful sentence: “Standing in the pit of the auditorium, you are someone I don’t know yet, handsome in silky shirt and tie, hair clipped close almost as skin on your fine-boned head.” The you here is Pratt’s longtime beloved, Leslie Feinberg, activist and author of Stone Butch Blues. The rest of the book retains this direct address to Feinberg, Pratt’s memories of their developing relationship being the fulcrum around which she explores her evolving definitions of sexuality and gender expression. On her website, Pratt wrote:

My adult life has been an exhilarating struggle to resist, militantly, the oppressive categories that the ruling status quo places on us–and to live, triumphantly, the identities and complexities that we feel to be true for ourselves. As my life and Leslie’s flowed together, I gained immeasurably in my understanding of that struggle—in my understanding of how we live all our sexualities, sex identities and gender expressions. The stories in my book S/HE are about these complexities in our daily life—and many of them are also love tributes to Leslie. I could write a book about how much I love hir—and I have.

There is one last passage I want to quote from S/HE—what is perhaps the most beautiful moment in the collection to me, a fragment which I think encapsulates part of the particular beauty of Pratt and Feinberg’s relationship. This is from “Palace,” a short essay centered around a memory of walking through a garden. It’s one of those wonderful moments where the writer refers directly to the thing they’re writing, which we’re now reading. I love these moments, because they make the writer feel suddenly, wildly present, as if I am reading the book in the same instant they are writing it. I can imagine both the scene she is writing about and, later, the act of writing of it—the author at her desk, her pen moving across the page, or the typewriter clacking. Here is the excerpt:

We stroll slowly down the green aisle, while I tell you something of what I am writing now, vignettes of daily life, the delicate twining of forbidden words, the way sex and gender and sexuality spread their tendrils through our lives and wrench us open, like the kudzu vine that heaves up asphalt from the road or pulls strands of barbed wire from the fencepost. I tell you how often I am afraid to write what leaps through that gap. As we reach the grape arbor’s leafy corridor, you suddenly kneel in front of me and kiss my hands. At the edge of the emerald lawn other visitors stare at the extravagant gesture, while I shift between unease and delight. You say, “I’m telling you now: Whatever you write of me, or of us together, you will never have to ask if I approve. The only place I want to live with you is in the palace of truth.”

I can’t read those words—let alone copy them into this open word document, as I did just now—without my eyes filling. I began writing these notes in my bed, in the early a.m. hours, but of course now that I am coming to the end, I am somewhere else (a coffee shop), on a different day (a Saturday, the day heating up, October still continuing on in its unseasonably warm spell), which is to say that as I wrote those words—Pratt’s words, Feinberg’s, their poetry, this intimate moment which we’ve been allowed to enter—I found myself openly crying in a coffee shop, not really caring if anyone noticed.

Further reading:

  • This essay by Julie Marie Wade published at Lambda Literary about Pratt’s 1990 poetry collection, Crime Against Nature.

  • Pratt’s poem “Justice, Come Down” from The Dirt She Ate.

  • Magnified: Pratt’s final collection of poetry, a series of love poems working through the loss of her beloved. And also this interview with Pratt and Sarah Heying, talking about the book in 2021.

  • This essay on the queer south by Pratt, which was adapted from a speech she gave at the 2020 Southeastern Women's Studies Conference.

Reading Notes: Ecopoetry and Climate

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Recently, I completed my comprehensive exams towards my PhD in English. The process for our exams follows a portfolio method; we compile two lists of about 40 books each, then develop portfolios around those lists before taking an oral capstone. Throughout the months I worked on these portfolios, stacks of books followed me around my apartment. My head grew full of the poets I was studying—Arthur Sze, W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton, Natalie Diaz, Ada Limón. For both of my lists, I focused on ecopoetry—first taking a general look at the field, and then focusing more specifically on contemporary women writers.

A few things emerged as I read. The first was an interest in time—that is, memory, mortality, and the way perceptions of time continue to shift as technology grows, the world becoming more connected in some respects and less connected in others. As I studied contemporary women poets, I became interested in thinking about how women writers address desire in their work, especially in how it connects with the natural world while resisting dominant narratives of femininity and nature. Place, as well, became a thread spiderwebbing through the works, inextricable from ideas of identity and culture as well as relationships to the natural world.

I’m finished with my portfolios now, but I’m still thinking about many of the questions that came out of the time I spent with these books. Today, my social media feeds are filled with images of houses being carried downstream by floodwaters, whole towns swept away, while people along the coastlines keep their eyes on new storms brewing in the Gulf. I am under no illusion that reading or writing poetry will alone shift the dial on the enormous political and capitalist forces which place us in the climate crisis we are now vividly witnessing and experiencing. And yet, I am comforted by the intelligent, empathetic, and deeply caring writers who are making meaning out of rising sea levels, storms, and wildfires. In her introduction to The Ecopoetry Anthology, Ann Fisher-Wirth writes that coediting the anthology “has been a labor of love against despair.” And her coeditor, Laura-Gray Street, writes that “Maybe one day we won’t need a term like ecopoetry because all poetry will be inherently ecological. […] But in the meantime we will continue to need green lenses like The Ecopoetry Anthology. We will need to keep following green things—all things strange and wild and small—listening to and learning their songs/psalms and singing back out own.”

Here is a list of all of the books I spent time with for the last year+; below are just a handful that stood out.

Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead, West Virginia University Press, 2018
Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, originally published as a long sequence in her 1938 collection U.S. 1, is an account of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster in West Virginia in the 1930’s, in which hundreds of miners (many of them African American) died of lung disease due to inadequate safety measures while excavating rock containing high levels of silica to build a three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain. Based on Rukeyser’s own research, including a visit to Gauley Mountain, the series of poems is presented as a hybrid text, incorporating documents such as court testimony, medical reports, and letters written from the workers to the company running the excavation.

Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider (editors), The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice, Pleiades Press, 2018
A wonderfully diverse collection of essays which are tied together by their consideration of place and poetry. Essays that stood out include “Place in Mind” by Peter Streckfus, which describes the power of concrete detail to connect us to place in writing, allowing us to “take on a bodily point of view” (170). Elizabeth Bradfield’s “Fluid States: Ocean as Place & Poetic” points to poetry’s ability to “make vivid the impossible,” saying that “there is something in the suspended state that a poem conjures that allows us to consider the strange,” ultimately allowing us to come closer to nature (38). And Nick Lantza, in “Ghost Towns,” considers place through the context of loss, writing that it is “often what is missing from a place—the juxtaposition of endurance and loss—that makes it ghostly” (85).

Min Hyoung Song, Climate Lyricism, Duke University Press, 2022
At the center of the arguments within Climate Lyricism, Song makes a case for reading creative work within the context of climate change even when it isn’t explicitly engaged with the subject. “Climate change,” Song writes, “operates in a temporality that is not synchronous with human habits of thinking about time and in a space that is not commensurate with human inhabitation. It is occurring everywhere and nowhere in particular and in both short durations and impossibly long expanses of time” (3). In response, Song proposes ways of holding attention, singling out the lyric because of its compression of expression, use of apostrophe, attention to observation and language, and an investment in questions of what makes us human. (Song’s emphasis on reading climate within all creative work also made me think of this recent interview with Grady Chambers, who says “I think concerns about climate tend to enter my work incidentally rather than intentionally. […] I’m realizing how distressing that is: the effects of human-induced global warming are becoming so constant that they make their way into my writing regardless of whether I intend for them to. Which is scary.”) 

Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977
In Soto’s remarkable first collection, he centers the Californian San Joaquin Valley and the immigrant agricultural laborers who work there. The poems revolve around a cast of real people who Soto sometimes writes for or writes to; at other times, he writes poems out of their voices. The book’s title poem is composed in eight sections, with each section title corresponding to a natural element or place—Field, Wind (the only repeated section title, which gets two distinct sections), Stars, Sun, Rain, Fog, and Daybreak. Under these umbrellas, Soto describes the turning of the seasons with the sharply observational eye of someone who has worked the land. The work of hoeing runs like a seam through the collection—a laborious task requiring skill, stamina, and patience—but the payoff of the work, as Soto depicts it, is merely survival: the pay minimal, the workers hungry despite laboring to grow food, the harvest “that was not mine” (“Harvest”).

Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler, Coffee House Press, 2008
Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler was one of the first collections that came to mind as I was considering these lists. In many ways, it does what Smith does best: it’s deftly musical, inventive, poignant. It’s also a brilliant work of preservation and witness, revolving around the devastation that Hurricane Katrina left upon New Orleans. In its subject matter, it is a deeply ecopoetic project, taking a hard and critical look at how the effects of climate change and natural disaster are impacting marginalized populations at a much higher rate. What is perhaps most startling about this collection is its use of persona, taking on voices such as the voice of Ethel Freeman, a woman whose body sat in a wheelchair outside the New Orleans Convention Center for three days after her son Herbert was forced to leave her there. Smith also takes on the voice of the storm itself, personifying Katrina as a woman who is “restless,” “hungering,” “frantic”—a woman with an aching desire in a world that suppresses women’s desires. In the last of a series of “Katrina” poems scattered throughout the collection, Smith writes, “I was a rudderless woman in full tantrum, / throwing my body against the worlds I wanted. / I never saw harm in lending that ache” (4-6).

Taneum Bambrick, Vantage, Copper Canyon Press, 2019
The poems in Vantage tell the story of a town under ecological devastation following a dam collapse. The speaker is the only woman on an all-male labor crew. The poems are sharp and imagistic, and the images that shape this collection are not flowers and birds, but trash: discarded condoms, Pepsi cans, the rotting carcasses of dead animals. Violence runs like a seam through the collection, coloring the conversations the speaker of the poems has with her work crew. The speaker is someone who seems to want to be able to look in the face of the violence and environmental devastation around her as the men do, without reacting, but she often finds herself unable to stop herself from reacting—as in “Biological Control Task,” in which she cries while looking at a heron that had been shot, a hole blown out if its chest so that you could see through its body. Her crying makes the men “comfortable,” like she could be “a daughter, wife or something they knew how to see.” The gender dynamics of the crew become further complicated when the speaker finds herself feeling attracted to her boss, Park. All the while, the poems paint an atmosphere of decay and destruction: a startlingly specific vision of the United States that smells of rotting fish and “the rose deodorizer of a clean outhouse.”

Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks, Routledge, 2008
Definitions of home, community, and belonging are the issues bell hooks explores in this essay collection, which tackles issues of race, gender, and class and their linked relationships with place, land, and land stewardship. At the heart of the essays is hooks’ experience of leaving her childhood home in Kentucky, only to return to it later in life, exploring how her own definitions of “home” have changed through her experience with the world. What hooks is especially adept at in her critical work is her synthesis of many sources, making each essay a way of thinking through a question through multiple voices, each of them propelling her inquiry further. One example early in the collection comes in her essay “Kentucky Is My Fate,” in which she quotes from Carol Lee Flinders’ Rebalancing the World to define a culture of belonging in which there is “intimate connection with the land to which one belongs, empathic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservation, deliberateness, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution, and openness of spirit” (13). This working definition is one she comes back to multiple times, using it to build her consideration of her own personal geography as well as broader considerations of what belonging means within the system of dominator culture.

Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy (editors), The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, Milkweed Editions, 2011
From the editors’ introduction: “If what is called ‘nature writing’ aims to understand how we comprehend and then live responsibly in the world, then it must recognize the legacies of the Americas’ past in ways that are mindful of the complex historical and cultural dynamics that have shaped us all. Perhaps some would say this isn’t a goal of writing about nature or natural history. But if such writing examines human perceptions and experiences of nature, if an intimacy with and response to the larger-than-human world define who or what we are, if we as people are part of nature, then the experiences of all people on this land are necessary stories, even if some voices have been silent, silenced, or simply not recognized as nature writing. What is defined by some as an edge of separation between nature and culture, people and place, is a zone of exchange where finding common ground is more than possible; it is necessary.”

Recent Events and Publications

Hello all! I’ve just wrapped up my fall book tour events, and am filled with gratitude for all the support I’ve been given over these past months. In September, I flew down to Mississippi State University to give a reading for the Price Caldwell Visiting Writers Series. In October, I read with fellow Nebraska poets Katie Marya, Kimberly Reyes, and Carolina Hotchandani to celebrate the release of Carolina’s new collection, The Book Eaters (which I highly recommend). In early October, I flew home to Ligonier, PA to visit family, and while I was there I led a workshop on place-based environmental writing at the Ligonier Valley Library. We had a wonderful turnout, and it felt like the perfect way to end this string of events, being that it was held in the library where I spent so much time when I was young.

In publication news, I have a new poem, “The Decay of Progress and the Progress of Decay,” out in EcoTheo Review. I also have two recent interviews: one with the good folks at COMP: an interdisciplinary journal, and one with Jordan Charlton for the Southern Indiana Review’s Afterwords column.

Finally, in September I also had the good fortunate to attend a writing retreat hosted by UNL’s College of Arts and Sciences, where I spent three magical days writing, walking, and thinking in the beautiful surroundings of Cedar Point Biological Station. While there, I made progress on a new manuscript that I’m excited about; more on that later!