Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Camille Dungy: It’s important to me to remind readers that the black experience in America is not all trauma. It’s not all pain and suffering and horror. There is beauty here. There is belonging and peace and joy and as the “Sorrow Home” poem noted, one of the most frustrating things is having the ability to access that joy be robbed from you and one of the most important things for me about this collection, “Black Nature,” is its statement of our presence and our stake in observing and enjoying the landscapes and flora and fauna that are our birth rights as well.

Jo Reed: That is ecopoet, essayist, and two-time NEA literature Fellow Camille T. Dungy. And this is Art Works—the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. 

Since the ancients, there’s been a romanticism to nature poetry—untouched bucolic settings with poets enamored observers outside of nature. Ecopoetry strips away this illusion. “Outside of nature” doesn’t exist. We are part of that natural world. And ecopoetry highlights the complexities within the environment, the impact by and on the societies and cultures within it and the multitude of interconnections between humans and our environment.  Award-winning writer Camille Dungy is one of the important voices in ecopoetry working today. In a genre long been dominated by white voices, she explores these entangled connections between humans and nature from her position as an African American woman in the United States. And she does so with precise detail, rhythmic lyricism and a broad inclusiveness. Her fourth collection of poetry Trophic Cascade, for example, gives us poems where nature, motherhood, loss, and racial violence all intersect. And while the collection never shies away from confronting the wounds of environmental degradation and the violence of racial oppression, Dungy also is aware of the hope made possible by our deep interconnectedness to the natural world and to each other.

Camille’s Dungy’s writing honors include an American Book Award, a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, two NAACP Image Award nominations, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. She’s also received not one but two NEA literature fellowships—one in 2003 for poetry and then another in 2018 NEA fellowship for prose. Camille T. Dungy is also the editor of the 2009 path-breaking anthology called Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African-American Nature Writing.  The anthology challenged assumptions about nature writing by insisting that the place of African-Americans Nature poets be recognized on their own terms… as writers whose connection to nature is steeped in and complicated by history.  In other words, existing outside of history is as impossible as existing outside of nature. Given that insight, and the range of poems within its covers,  Black Nature remains a book as significant and as far-reaching today as it was when it was first published.

Camille Dungy: It’s a thing that makes me quite happy, actually, that eleven years later, this book continues to be so relevant and useful and practical because when I was pulling it together, the idea that black Americans would think about the natural world in poetry was sort of a surprise and when I did the research I needed to convince the press to take on the project, I reviewed most of the major anthologies, all the major anthologies that were available at the time in 2006 and all of those major anthologies actually only included six poems by five black poets. It was like we just weren’t there in the canon at all, which was very surprising to me because in my own personal file of poems I love, I had about 45 such poems that would have fit and so, I had to really think about why this really gross erasure had happened of black poetry and correct that absence.

Jo Reed: Well, you most certainly did with this anthology and you open the book with Lucille Clifton. Do you mind reading that?

Camille Dungy: I would love to read that. Lucille Clifton is one of my heroes and I’m so happy to have so many of her poems included in this anthology. “

 

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?

 

Jo Reed: That is Lucille Clifton and that is the way you began this book. Tell me why.

Camille Dungy: It does seem like the perfect example of part of why those erasures existed. The fact that so frequently when African American people are writing about the greater than human world, there are these moments where you just bump into the realities of history, the realities of violence and danger and terror, economic realities and political realities and cultural realties that are tangled up in the landscape and inescapable in that way and when you have an idea of environmental poetry or nature poetry dealing only with pristine landscapes, landscapes where people don’t exist to borrow language from the Wilderness Act, landscapes that are untrammeled by man, you then expect the poems out of that space to not have these complications of history, but so many really, really wonderful poems that think about our engagement with the environment do also think about us, do think about people and how we treat each other and those poems need to be seen as well.

Jo Reed: Well, you have 180 poems from 93 poets and the poems span 400 years. Can you tell me your thinking in the selection process?

Camille Dungy: This was such a fun process, the collection of this anthology and I feel like it’s really important to point out that the work was there. I was not creating work out of whole cloth that didn’t exist already. I began the process of putting together this book in the summer of 2006 and it was published out in the world by the end of 2009. That’s a pretty incredibly quick turnaround and that was only possible because the work was already there. It simply wasn’t being seen in this kind of-- with this kind of label and in this category. So, I went to-- I was living in the Bay Area at the time, so I used Stanford’s library and Berkeley’s library. I went to the Poets House in New York. I went down to-- Emory University has a wonderful black poetry collection and I spent some time there, making sure to just really read into the African American literary canon and find these overlooked pieces and I also reached out to living writers and invited work from them and there responses became really interesting to me that one set of readers-- or writers would say “Thank you. I have been doing this work my whole career and nobody has seen it. Thank you for seeing it.” Those writers included people like Ed Roberson, who we now really do understand as one of the preeminent voices in American eco-poetry, but he was-- could have disappeared for a long time in that realm. Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton-- these are poets who could have their own collections of their environmental poetry alone and they weren’t included in the literature and the other response from writers was that they were surprised that I was asking for work from them because they didn’t see themselves as environmental writers. One of my favorite stories of this is the poet Sean Hill, who we now do very much consider a member of this world. But Sean Hill said “This is a poem about my first job.” To him, again, it was like an economic poem or it was like a poem about memory. The poem was called “Seven Pastorals at Sixteen.” He was a shepherd at 16 years old. If the man who is a shepherd cannot write a pastoral, which is the ultimate in the world of the nature poem, who does get to write the nature poem? But he just hadn’t-- there was not a space where he had been able to see himself in that way yet. So, that was really exciting to be able to be part of that opening.

Jo Reed: Well, there is a lot of weight in these poems. We’re getting the view from the fields rather than from the manor house.

Camille Dungy: Yes.

Jo Reed: History is ever, ever present because how do you exist outside of history any more than how can you exist outside of nature.

Camille Dungy: Correct.

Jo Reed: It just doesn’t happen. One poem that I think really illustrates this so beautifully is Margaret Walker’s poem “Sorrow Home.”

Camille Dungy: Yes.

Jo Reed: Would you mind reading that?

Camille Dungy: I would love to read that poem. Oh, goodness. Thank you for bringing me back to this poem.

Jo Reed: It’s so beautiful and heartbreaking.

Camille Dungy: Margaret Walker, “Sorrow Home,”

 

My roots are deep in southern life, deeper than John Brown

or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weened

in a tropical world. The palm tree and banana leaf,

mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me.

 

Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong

 with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and

the spring growth of wild onion.

 

I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats

 with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in

by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.

 

 I want the cotton fields, tobacco, and the cane. I want to

walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground.

Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone.

 

Oh, Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone

and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds, and

the chain gangs keep me from my own?”

 

Jo Reed: That is “Sorrow Home” by Margaret Walker. Tell us a little bit about Margaret Walker.

Camille Dungy: Oh, Margaret Walker-- she was a novelist and a poet.  She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first collection “For My People” in 1942 and was the first black writer to win that award and continued to publish prolifically through her lifetime and received many, many honors and awards for her work, including the novel “Jubilee” and a collection of poems, which I love, from which I found the poem “Sorrow Home,” called “This is My Century.” So, her writing was very, very often rooted in history, but also in the struggle to claim space and ability to thrive and survive in a place that is your own.

Jo Reed: Yes. Place is so central to “Sorrow Home,” even the title and you can just feel that desire and that urge to return to a home in a space where you’re not safe.

Camille Dungy: Yeah, that you love.

Jo Reed: That you love.

Camille Dungy: And you should be allowed to love, but that that joy and peace is being consistently robbed.

Jo Reed: The breadth of styles in this book is just extraordinary and you chose to not present work chronologically, but rather thematically. Just in a general sense-- I don’t expect you to go to through the whole thing because it’s a very substantial book-- but generally, how did you think about organizing these? Because when I’m reading it, I’m seeing writers in conversation with one another.

Camille Dungy: Absolutely. That’s one of the things that I love to do when I am editing is to create those conversations through time and space and aesthetic and culture and area of interest. So, the book is organized into ten cycles and you are introduced to each cycle with an essay, a short essay. When I commission the essays, I ask the people to think of them as vestibules. It’s an entry space into the mind of this particular section and we begin with cycle one as just looking and it’s just these poems that are very observational and not necessarily canted in one particular direction or the other. It’s just that big, wide, open eye and then the poems moved into a kind of sense of connection and a presence and then the cycles become darker and more fraught and they speak to the violence that is often inherent, particularly in the African American experience in this country and violence and removal and separation and disenfranchisement. It looks at our relationships with other living beings, bugs, and trees. There’s an entire cycle thinking about disaster, which so frequently, the things we call natural disasters are really human caused disasters or at least a collaboration between the human and the wind or the river and the places where we are allowed to build or not allowed to build, etc. So, there’s a cycle that really looks at that. One of the most interesting cycles to me is one that really looks at a sense of ownership, like “I belong here,” that comes towards the end of the book and it’s this re-grounding cycle and that one is the only cycle in the collection where no poem was written before the mid-1970s and in fact, most of the poets were born after the early 1970s, meaning that the mind of the poets who are creating those poems are forged after the major strides of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movements. They are minds of people who have been able to make a home and buy property after the housing rights act and redlining is made no longer legally the path for excluding people from different properties and things and these poems are really different from the poems of their predecessors and I made a point throughout the collection of trying to be really equal in terms of gender representation, in terms of regional representation, and in terms of time out of which the poets are writing, but that one section, when I did that review, I noted that that time element was not equitable as they are in other collections or other cycles and I decided to leave that as it was because that seemed to make a really important statement also.

Jo Reed: There are poems that are unlikely, that are funny and that are charming and I’m thinking of two very, very short ones. One is a Richard Wright poem, “Number 175.”

Camille Dungy: Those haiku-- towards the end of his life, Richard Wright wrote all of these haiku that are just-- they’re just such a delight and sometimes they’re heartbreaking and sometimes they’re funny and this one that you’re mentioning is-- it feels a little of both to me,

 

 #175

Coming from the woods,

A bull has a lilac sprig

Dangling from a horn.

 

It is. It’s funny. You can see this image of this kind of sweet, sweet bull with this lilac sprig, but there’s also always in his haiku, I think, an element of really almost tragic nostalgia, right? I feel like you can see otherwise. You can see around the corner, past that delightful image of the bull into the image that we usually see of bulls and the violence and large terror, really, that comes in the body of a bull and Richard Wright is pushing against that expectation for what a bull is with this sweet little lilac on the horn makes that expectation even louder to me without his having written it into the poem. I just think that’s so masterful.

Jo Reed: And it’s so visual.

Camille Dungy: Yes.

Jo Reed: There’s a scent about it.

Camille Dungy: I talk to my students about that a lot, the sort of need to try and get all your senses into a poem whenever possible and in a haiku, to have managed to get found in sight and smell in that few number of syllables, that’s quite impressive, right?

Jo Reed: Well, the last cycle of your book is “Comes Always Spring,” which is lovely, especially for this time of year, and a perfect way to end, I think, this book and, if you don’t mind, I really hate just hearing parts of poems, but your poem, “What to Eat and What to Drink and What to Leave for Poison” is really long. So, would you mind just reading the first stanza?

Camille Dungy: I’d be happy to. Yes. I can tell you it takes exactly 11 minutes to read the whole poem and I’m sure your listeners may or may not want to do that. So, we will...

Jo Reed: Well, we can direct them to the book where they can read the whole thing there.

Camille Dungy: Absolutely.

What to Eat and What to Drink and What to Leave for Poison

1

Only now in spring can the place be named:

tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,

dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow

on my knowing. All winter, I was lost.

Fall, I found myself here, with no texture

my fingers know. Then, worse, the white longing

that downed us deep three months. No flower heat.

That was winter. But now, in spring, the buds

flock our trees. Ten million exquisite buds,

tiny and loud, flaring their petaled wings,

bellowing from ashen branches vibrant

keys, the chords of springs triumph: fisted heart,

dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.

The song is drink, is color. Come. Now. Taste.

 

Jo Reed: It’s a wonderful poem, Camille, and it really fits so beautifully for the closing of this book.  

Camille Dungy: It’s important to me to remind readers that the black experience in America is not all trauma. It’s not all pain and suffering and horror. There is beauty here. There is belonging and peace and joy and as the “Sorrow Home” poem noted, one of the most frustrating things is having the ability to access that joy be robbed from you and one of the most important things for me about this collection, “Black Nature,” is its statement of our presence and our stake in observing and enjoying the landscapes and flora and fauna that are our birth rights as well.

Jo Reed: Well, I think that’s a really nice segue into your own book of poetry that I really also want to talk about because it’s terrific. It’s called “Trophic Cascade.” First of all, what is a trophic cascade?

Camille Dungy: A trophic cascade is the events that happen when a trophy creature, a top predator, is either removed from or replaced in a landscape and so, the presence of that top predator will then affect all the lives up and down the food chain and will affect with great changes on a landscape, either via their removal or their presence in a space. So, that is the ecological concept of the trophic cascade and in the collection, I speak directly to that in an ecological sense, but I’m also, throughout the collection, thinking about my own trophy creatures, my daughter and elders and what changed in the landscape of my life when they either appeared or disappeared from my world.

Jo Reed: Well, why don’t we hear the title poem?

Camille Dungy:  Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of gray wolves
to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling
of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt
of the midcentury. In their up reach
songbirds nested, who scattered
seed for underbrush, and in that cover
warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew
returned, also vole, and so came soon hawk
and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them
hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade
and kestrel shade haunted newly berried
runnels where deer no longer rummaged, cautious
as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves.
Berries brought bear, while undergrowth and willows,
growing now right down to the river, brought beavers,
who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.
Came, too, the night song of the fathers
of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark
gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools
of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who
fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps
came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region
until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more
trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river
that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,
compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed,
I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time
a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.

 

Jo Reed: “Trophic Cascade,” there is so much I love about this poem. That turn at the end, where suddenly we’re moving from a vast landscape to an equally large life-changing moment and it really reminded me of the beginning of “Dust Tracks on a Road,” Zora Neale Hurston’s book, “Mama died when I was nine and changed the world.”

Camille Dungy: Well, that is a comparison that makes me quite happy. Thank you, because Zora Neale Hurston is one of my heroes.

Jo Reed: Tell me the impetus for this particular poem.

Camille Dungy: There was a viral video that was going around  the time when I was writing this poem and I just was obsessed with it and I was so obsessed with it that I went and I did further research and I found out more about what those animals would have been in the area and what they look like and where they lived and I just was writing all of those things and the big list part of the poem, where I was just really interested in that ecological story and then I just stopped one day and thought “Why? Why does this matter to me so much?” It was a level of obsession that was curious and why did I care and that’s when the turn in the poem happened because I just figured out that it felt like me. It felt like that, that Yellowstone landscape was my life and so, the poem was complete and then it sat for a while looking like a normal poem lined up on the left margin of the page and I just was dissatisfied with that until one day, I just went to the top of my Microsoft Word and flipped the alignment to make it a right justified poem because, of course, my whole landscape had changed and I just flipped the landscape of the poem in that way and then it was ready.

Jo Reed: I’m curious about your interplay between research and these imaginative leaps because you do use such precise details about nature.

Camille Dungy: My father is a scientist.

Jo Reed: Oh, okay.

Camille Dungy: So, precision is important. You name things what they are in the home that I grew up in and I’m so grateful for that training. Among other things, the naming things what they are actually makes the world more friendly. It makes the world feel more like I am entering a room and I know everybody’s name and who they are and where they’re from and so, the ways in which I’m able to see the greater than human world in that collaborative sense as other vibrant living beings with stories of their own that I’m interested in, that’s helped me as a person as much as it’s helped me as a writer.

Jo Reed: You talked about the way a poem looks on a page and its significance of that for you and certainly for you and certainly for us as readers. The way you used the blank page in the poem “Brevity” is extremely powerful. It’s a powerful poem as is, but the way you have that placed, man, does it really clobber the reader. Could you describe what you did and your thinking behind it?

Camille Dungy: Yes. The poem is quite brief.

 

Brevity

As in four girls; Sunday

dresses, bone, ash, bone, ash, bone, ash, bone.

 

That’s all that’s on the page and this book is a nonstandard with book and so, if a normal trim size is about four and a half inches, this one is about six and a half inches. So, it’s a lot of blank space around that and then you turn the page and there’s another very, very blank page and at the very bottom is a line, grayscale line with these names, “Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair.” Those are the four girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing, 16th Street Birmingham church bombing and I didn’t want to just put that information in the notes in the back, like incidental information as part of the story that happens in that poem. But I also didn’t want it to be like right away, like a footnote. So, the visual decisions around how to make that work are really part of the whole way that I constructed that poem. Their names needed to be there, but you also needed some time with the images of the poem before that part came in.

Jo Reed: Very, very powerful. How do you begin a pem? Do you begin with an image, an idea, a line? It depends on the poem?

Camille Dungy: It absolutely depends on the poem. In that case, all the language in that poem came to me as it is written, woke me up in the middle of the night with that phrase and I wrote it down and I thought that I would go back and expand on it. Actually, what I did was go back and pull back. At the end of the poem, I had the phrase “The end,” which I removed from the poem because sadly, there has not yet been an end to that kind of terror and violence for black children in this country and so, that felt insincere to have the phrase “The end.” So, sometimes, poems come to me almost completely. Sometimes, though, far more frequently, it is just like long periods of time doing research. Sometimes, it’s about trying to find the right words. Sometimes it’s about getting the details right. Sometimes it’s about the shape of the poem on the page. Sometimes it’s about figuring out where the poem starts. And so, my belief was always you just write. You just write and you write and your poem’s intelligence will reveal itself to you if you are open to it.

Jo Reed: You’ve received two NEA Lit Fellowships, one for poetry in 2003 and one for prose in 2018. What these fellowships allowed you to do.

Camille Dungy: Oh, my goodness. These fellowships are so important. I am so grateful that the Literary Fellowship Program has been able to remain when so many of the other aspects of NEA individual giving have come under fire at different parts in our cultural and political history, what writers can do with the time that the fellowships can buy. Writing takes time to really be able to breathe and to read and to do the research, but also, honestly to just take walks sometimes and just sit still with the ideas in your mind, which our very busy lives don’t often allow. I tell this story sometimes with the poetry fellowship. I was able to take a semester off of teaching and go and do research for what became my second book of poetry and I remember a day where I was just talking to somebody. I was at an artist colony and I was just talking to somebody about the work I was doing and they said “Oh, have you gone to see the map rock?” and I was like “The what?” and there was a rock. It was outside of Saratoga Springs, New York. There was a rock where enslaved people who had self-emancipated-- the easy term we use is runaways-- had etched a trail map on to this stone, on to this boulder that when you looked at it carefully knowing what you were seeing, there was the lake, there was a boat, there was a ferry dock, there was a-- it was a trail, but if you didn’t know what you were looking at, it just looked like strange little markings on a stone. I would not have been able to have that experience-- I would not have been able to get away from my paying job. I would not have been able to afford to travel to this place to have touched a stone that had guided people to freedom, right? So, to me, the NEA is the stone that guides writers to freedom. The NEA is this moment in a writer’s life where they can really feel seen and that people believe in their work, but also that they have the time to be in their work. So, I am ever grateful. As a prose writer, it was really the same thing. I kind of had just pivoted into writing essays and I was a newbie in that field as well, a field in which I never had formal training in the way that I did with poetry, right? So, how presumptuous of me to think I’m going to start publishing books of essays, but that NEA really was a boost in my confidence that I must be on the right trail.

Jo Reed: Tell me what you’re working on now.

Camille Dungy: I have actually just finished and passed along to my agent a new collection of personal essays. If “Guidebook to Relative Strangers,” my 2017 collection was about traveling out in the world and understanding my place in America as a black woman while traveling, this new collection is really focused on home and my own backyard and what I could learn about history and my place in it from looking in my own backyard.

Jo Reed: And can I ask you to read one more poem as to end this lovely discussion?

Camille Dungy: Absolutely.

Jo Reed: If I choose, I would love you to read “Against Nostalgia.”

Camille Dungy: Oh, yay. That poem started as an email asking where poems come from. Sometimes you write a little thing that seems like it’s just a little quip and then you think “There may be something else there. I may need to go back in and see.”

 

Against Nostalgia

I supposed you have food there, too, but here it is summer
and we have asparagus, avocado, and stone fruit.
I am so happy.

The yard trees of my youth yield more fruit than we can handle.

I was going to bake chicken with cherries and apricot,
but already it is too hot. I can’t turn on the oven.

Sometimes I bite straight into plums.
Other times I slice them to serve on a platter.

Sometimes I want to move away
so I must remember everything I used to love: stone fruit and asparagus,
draughts of eucalyptus carried through the window on the wind.

 

 Jo Reed: And that is a lovely place to end it. Camille, thank you so much. Really, thank you for giving me your time. Thank you for your wonderful work.

Camille Dungy: Thank you for your questions and your attention and your care and this opportunity to speak with your audience about my poetry and the poetry of other African American environmental writers.

Jo Reed: Thank you.

That is ecopoet, essayist and two-time NEA literature fellow Camille T. Dungy. We were talking about her edited work Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African-American Nature Writing and her collection of poetry Trophic Cascade.

April brings a multitude of blessings: it’s Spring, it’s National Poetry Month and it’s also Jazz Appreciation Month. Join us as we celebrate the 2021 NEA Jazz Masters Terri Lyne Carrington, Tootie Heath, Henry Threadgill and Phil Schaap.  The NEA, in collaboration with SFJAZZ, is presenting a star-studded virtual tribute concert in their honor--with remarks from Second Gentleman and long-time jazz lover Douglas Emhoff!   The fun takes place on Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 8:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT. The concert is free and available to watch online—you can find full details at arts.gov.

You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe and thanks for listening.