Yesterday, at the end of the reading at the Field Museum, someone in the audience asked if I consider myself a nature poet. I realized I'd just spent a good half hour or so talking about how I can't stop writing about birds. About how a project that was supposed to be about dinosaurs and extinction would up also being largely bird-laden. About the Cornell Boxes and my second book, in the bird museum. About how I'd made a bee-line on my first visit, not to the Evolving Planet exhibit, but to the Hall of Birds, the very same hall where I was giving that very reading. And yet, I faltered and wasn't sure what to say.
When I think nature, I often think of Mary Oliver, whose poems, while I find a lot of them sort of facile, usually use nature as a means to teach us something about humanity. The nature is the tool by which we come to understand something more about ourselves. I know many poets who write similar observances and explorations of the natural world, and in fact, have published a good many (much better than Oliver) with dgp. But as for me, it's strange to claim it. I would definitely say that I am endeared to the natural world in my visual art. Today, I was messing with the text/image pieces of the summer house, with it's plentiful bees and trees. The poems themselves are about changelings and bee-children. I've used bees as machinery in many series (the honey machine, how to write a love poem in a time of war.) I regularly use nature imagery in projects, old botanical illustrations, graphs and charts and diagrams. Even my paintings, usually waterolor, are abstract flowers and landscapes.
And perhaps much of it has to do with the midwest landscape that pervades every book I've ever written (except maybe major characters in minor films, which seems more routed in urban life, but has it's share of critters). In the shared property of water and stars, you had a natural landscape that was always intruding on the suburban one. girl show is defined by it's fixing the carnival and it's women amidst a flat midwestern landscape (both actual and metaphorical). And maybe this is where things get weird. The sideshow women. The mermaids of salvage. The women as monsters in pretty much every other project. My love of amateur cryptozoology that filters into artwork and zines.
As I worked on extinction event, I've been reading idly a few pieces on the eco-gothic, whose gist is largely that nature is not just a background for human activity to occur in, but a force itself. The menacing forest. The haunted garden. The terrible sea. That nature (including plants, animals, landscape, weather) is just as much a character in any story as the ones with speaking parts. I like this sort of nature, the kind that is dangerous and may just kill you. Much of that is where extinction event comes from with it's mutations and droughts. My answer to the question, in the moment, was that I tended to write a lot about horror and the supernatural lately--scary movies, serial killers, stabby adolescents urged on by Slenderman. But that nature is always present in them--weird or twisted as it may be.
