eco-gothically yours,
A few years back, before the pandemic and when I was still working at the library, I did a reading at the Field Museum, where I was invited to explore the collection and write some poems inspired by those wanderings. It was sort of a big deal, at least for me, in my journey as a writer, the Field Museum being one of the first places I ever loved in the city, and perhaps courtesy of a 9th grade field trip, when I decided I needed to live here. I spent a couple days there in the afternoons, which are far less hectic than mornings and earlier in the day, at least in summer at the height of the tourist season. I wound up barely covering the entire museum, forgoing the early civilization and the Egyptian collections to focus on the more nature-bound subject matter.
What resulted was a short chapbook of poems I eventually released with photos I'd taken on those visits, extinction event, which , in hind sight at times, felt like a dimly lit prophetic rumination on human fragility. I read in the Hall of Birds, with groups of school children traipsing through the background of the dozen or so who gathered to hear me read. When I was finished, someone asked me if I considered myself a nature poet and it threw me for a loop. I had to think really hard about it in the subsequent weeks. Since yes, that project, and indeed much of my writing revels in the natural world. However, its probably more hedonistic wallowing than saying much about nature itself (at least beyond that particular project that dealt with extinction. )
As in, I write a lot about nature. It filters into every poem. I delight quite readily in learning about new plants and new creatures and the environment of the places I write about and set my story poems inside of. I was a somewhat rural child. We had a house more in town until I was 9, then settled in at the borders of an urban area. There were horses outside my window and over a fence. Blackberries grew amidst sumac bushes. Deer regularly walked through the yard and up the driveway like they belonged there. And they probably did. My aunt, in the house behind ours, took care of a slew of wild animals--racoons, hawks, kittens we bottle fed from under a wood pile. My parents propagated lush gardens, both floral and vegetable. We were free to wander the areas both in the confines of our property and beyond, including a sleep incline down to the river at the end of the road.
While I am a city girl now and forever, many of the first poems I wrote here were far more rural and drawn from the settings where I had been but no longer lived. Later, I did a lot of research on the places I was writing about. exotica, for instance, takes place not on the prairie where my first book of carnival-inspired poems took place, but in the swampy environs of Florida, where performers wintered every year. the woods, was centered around the far north Wisconsin woods, where I often camped and visited family. It is a little more challenging for those projects set where I've never been (like the Greek poems that actually take place in Greece and involved much research on local plant life and terrain.) I am not a big traveler (too stressful, too expensive), but I am fond of armchair voyages via reading and learning about new places.
I've always thought that to be a "nature poet", one would yield nature in a sense-making way in their work, maybe like Mary Oliver. I am not sure I write the kinds of poems that make you see nature in a new way, or connect it to human experience. Not that that never happens in my work, I'm sure maybe that is a happy accident, but that I don't try to make that happen intentionally. Once exception is some tiny fledgling ideas I have that are in the vein of the eco-gothic, which I find fascinating and ripe for exploration. The point at which the landscape and nature becomes horrific. The sinister swamps of exotica. The rocky beachfront landscape littered with war-torn bodies in Troy in the Iphigenia poems. The supernatural parts of nature that make it uninhabitable and other and delightful ground for dark and sinister things. I once read that it centers around nature as a dark and unknown force, and I love this In readings, there is a lot of discussion about binaries human/animal, urban/rural, that speak to me especially.
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