Issue 46 — the earth is a living thing
Black Nature, edited by Camille Dungy
Dear Reader,
We’ve been swaddled in on-and-off fog for the past few days. Bare tree branches fuzzy with white are a bit like pussy willows scaled up for effect. The marsh was full today, thanks to a full moon high tide.
I’m really hoping to see you for “A Startling Whoop.” This Zoom event will celebrate both the arrival of spring and Frugal Chariot’s first birthday with an exploration of Henry David Thoreau, that strange and enchanting bard of Nature. The thing I want to say is that Thoreau is so much more than his complex, sometimes contradictory, and massively influential ideas. His writing, at the level of the sentence, is just wildly entertaining. If you want a taste, do click on this Twitter thread that I started recently, which offers daily a snippet from his journals from the same day of the month.
We will be gathering next Sunday, March 27th at 4 PM Eastern, with a kick-ass panel of splendid writers for whom Thoreau has been both a subject and an inspiration: David Foster, Megan Marshall, and Ben Shattuck. I’m delighted to say that Hannah Harlow, co-owner of the Bookshop of Beverly Farms, will help me moderate the event. Register here. And buy an armful of books from Hannah by these great writers here.
This week’s issue is dedicated to Lucille Clifton, who rests in power.
Review
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry
Camille Dungy, editor
The University of Georgia Press, 2009
387 pages
$26.95
“Blessing the Boats” by Lucille Clifton is a poem I often write out by hand for couples on the eve of marriage.
(at St. Mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
There are so many things to admire in this poem of benediction set in a seaside village on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, especially its cargo of love and courage and hope. But one thing I always marvel at is its rhythmic swing: the principal stresses within these short lines vary in a way that generates a powerful effect. Sometimes the stress is at the end of the line (may the TIDE), sometimes in the middle (that is ENtering even now), and sometimes at the beginning (the LIP of our understanding), creating a rocking motion just irregular enough to feel like the motion of a boat being rocked by waves. The poem seems to culminate at the top of the tide—just when a crew might let slip the dock lines and go sailing—with a three-beat line of strong and equal stresses: SAIL through THIS to THAT.
So it was with a sharp intake of breath that I discovered the following Clifton poem, “surely i am able to write poems,” at the very beginning of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.
surely i am able to write poems celebrating grass and how the blue in the sky can flow green or red and the waters lean against the chesapeake shore like a familiar poems about nature and landscape surely but whenever i begin “the trees wave their knotted branches and . .” why is there under that poem always an other poem?
What might be “an other poem” under “blessing the boats”? It didn’t take me much time on the Internet to find a blog post with an insightful reference to this key passage in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! . . . Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die like a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom.
Douglass is addressing the fleet of boats in the Chesapeake, any one of which would be capable of carrying him to freedom. If we think of Douglass’s apostrophe to the boats of antebellum Maryland as “an other poem,” then Clifton’s boats offer a promise of escape “beyond the face of fear” from oppression, powered by a wind that “will love your back” and not scar it, as did Douglass’s brutal enslaver. The word “innocence” suggests the crime of slavery, to which so many innocent humans have been subjected. And of course there may be “an other poem”—and many other poems— about the ships that brought enslaved people across the Atlantic from Africa.
Black Nature offers readers not just a wonderful selection of poems about the Black experience of the natural world, but also the chance to question the pastoral tradition itself. Camille Dungy, a poet and Professor of English at Colorado State University, assembled this collection with care and insight, and organized it into thematic “cycles” that represent different types of Black experience in nature—including harmony, relationships with animals, abandonment, disaster, and regeneration. She wisely begins each section of the book with a short prose piece that supports and sustains this work of questioning. As she writes in her invaluable Introduction,
Though these poems defy the pastoral conventions of Western poetry, are they not pastorals? The poems describe moss, rivers, trees, dirt, caves, dogs, fields: elements of an environment steeped in a legacy of violence, forced labor, torture, and death.
Later she says the cycles are designed to “encourage readers to divert their gaze into new directions, demanding that they notice new aspects of the world and accept alternative modes of description.”
Many of the poets use irony and humor to accomplish this diversion, often by playing with the reader's expectations of what a nature poem should be or sound like. Wanda Coleman has a poem entitled “Beaches, Why I Don’t Care For Them,” and Anthony Walton ends his poem “In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson” with the lines:
. . .we watch The wind, which makes itself known In the sea grass and as it dimples the water, Skimming like sunlight until a Coast Guard Chopper drowns for a moment the drone Of cars and trucks in the distance.
Some refuge.
Evie Shockley writes this winter poem in the manner of a singles classified ad:
[#12] Highly visual rural winter image seeks lyric poem (14-30 lines) for mutual enrichment and long-term relationship. Image offers frostbitten river and fog-covered fields where snow seems to rise toward its origins
In Black Nature, I discovered new poems by poets I revere, and I was also introduced to poets whom I now can’t imagine never having known. An example of the latter is Anne Spencer (1882-1975), who was a librarian and civil rights activist in Lynchburg, Virginia. Spencer was associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and hosted salons in the luxuriant garden she tended with her husband Edward. There are four very different poems by Spencer in Black Nature, each a masterwork. “White Things” is a powerful condemnation of white supremacy and racialized terror that enlists the colors of nature in a critique of the narrative of racial difference.
Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea. Black men are most men; but the white are free!
More than a decade has passed since Black Nature was published, and an editor today would have no shortage of choices for creating an urgent and necessary anthology of Black nature poems from the last dozen years. One can only hope such a volume might be in the works. In the meantime, we have this treasure trove of a book, an essential resource and a collective testament to the skill and beauty with which African American poets have created what Langston Hughes called “Earth Song.”
Other Voices, Other Forms
The Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum in Lynchburg is open to the public. In this video produced by The Cultural Landscapes Foundation, Spencer’s granddaughter Shaun Spencer-Hester provides a short introduction to Spencer’s extraordinary life and to this garden refuge.
Poem of the Week
the earth is a living thing
by Lucille Clifton
is a black shambling bear ruffling its wild back and tossing mountains into the sea is a black hawk circling the burying ground circling the bones picked clean and discarded is a fish black blind in the belly of water is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal is a black and living thing is a favorite child of the universe feel her rolling her hand in its kinky hair feel her brushing it clean
For Your Reading Radar
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, is the second novel by Irene Solà and translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem. This stylistically daring eco-fable of a farming family in the Pyrenees is told by multiple narrators, many of them non-human—including the clouds, a dog, the mountains, and the mushrooms!
For Your Calendar
In a nice coincidence with my Transcendental theme this spring, Terry Tempest Williams will be speaking via the Concord Museum on Thursday, March 31st at 7 PM Eastern. Her subject: “Beauty in a Broken World.” Register here.
Bookshop of the Week
Since Camille Dungy teaches in Colorado, let’s visit a Black-owned bookshop there. Tattered Covers is a Colorado institution with multiple locations.
That’s it for this week. Take care. xo Nicie
Thanks very much for this Eunice. I'm forwarding to my sister Eleanor.
That bookshop photo is a poem in itself! I always learn so much from this blog. It's a weekly reminder that no matter how big I am able to imagine the world being, it continually turns out to be so much bigger.