Response 8: Nature Poetry

One poem that spoke to me loudly on a visceral and emotional level was Lucille Clifton's "defending my tongue." The language in this poem is not standard English and punctuation and capitalization are absent. The voice itself - the way it speaks, the words it chooses - says so much about landscape and place, and says it in a way that description and metaphor can't. I appreciate that this poem was included with the other examples of nature poetry because it is not a traditional nature poem. The words are harsh and bitter and angry, sometimes almost violent. The posture in the poem is defensive, as evidenced by the title and the first stanza in which the narrative voice justifies why it must be as it is. The tone is often accusatory, perhaps directed at writers or nature poets or members of the dominant culture in general who talk about the beauty of the landscape and leave out the pain of its people. Clifton doesn't use specific or complex language to describe the landscape, she mentions only "the dirt" and "the tree." These are recorded as sites of suffering: "...the trees / my grandfolk swung from the dirt / they planted in and ate". There's nothing about conservation of the natural world in this poem. The landscape is destroyed, but not in an ecological sense. To me, this is a poem that shows how intimately human experience and the landscape are connected, and that these connections aren't always a choice. Sometimes the connection is forced and ugly and so traumatic that it breaks the landscape forever.

Another poem I appreciated for its use of language was W.S. Merwin's "The Last One." I thought the rhythm, repetition of words and phrases, unadorned language and seemingly matter-of-fact tone amplified the themes of this poem, like the apathy and hubris of the cutters (not sure what else to call them), and the distance between them and the natural world. There was no punctuation in this poem except for a period at the end of every line. This seemed to underline the finality and starkness of everything that occured. It also had the effect of strangely disconnecting the lines from each other, as if an observer watching the events in the poem unfold might not see a connection between cause and effect. The structure of the poem also made it a feel bleak, detached, and numb, giving it a mock-objective quality. Another aspect of this poem I enjoyed is that after the line "They took it away its shadow stayed on the water" the poem becomes like magical realism, like mythology, (perhaps almost like a B-horror movie). I didn't expect that. Mythologies hold a certain kind of authority, an archetypal or emotional truth, and co-opting that form gave that to this poem as well.

"Walk in Tick Season" made me think differently about depicting human relationships with the natural world because it shows the human as passive in the interaction with the tick. Much of the nature poetry I've read, if it includes a human character, shows the human as the active party, for better or for worse. I like the idea of thinking about ways in which the natural world acts on us as humans, rather than vice versa. I hope to explore this in future writing. In "Tick Season," the human is aware and narrating the tick's journey, but it is from the tick's point of view. The tick is the heroine of the poem, even though she is doing something pretty unpleasant to the narrator. I like the fact that Laurie Kutchins chose a tick for her subject in the first place - very different than writing about a flower or a tree or a landscape. I think Kutchins is able to pull this poem off because she doesn't weigh in on what she (the human) thinks about the tick being there. She just imagines the tick's point of view and narrates it. This poem got me thinking about nature writing topics I hadn't thought about before. Maybe I'll try to write a lyrical piece about an insect, or an earthworm, at some point. I've always loved earthworms and owe them a great debt from a long-ago Biology class.