“When I write of an organism, plant or animal, I want to be clear it’s not just set dressing for the poem.”
-Mary Beth Becker-Lauth
When I first read your poems, I felt an aching silence—and something behind it that pushes forward regardless. Perhaps it is a growth of understanding. How do you relate to this movement, and did you craft these poems with this effect in mind?
Most of these poems were drafted and revised during a workshop at the Loft Literary Center. It was about the relationship of poetry to silence. Chelsea B. DesAutels taught the workshop, and many of her edits made their way into the final poems. That workshop was essential! As a poet, I struggle with what (and how much) to reveal in any particular piece. There’s always a tension between the said and unsaid. I find that the unsaid usually ends up with the loudest voice in the poem.
I’m very guarded in my emotional life. I gravitate to poetry because it allows me the freedom to disclose creatively— to say without saying, to choose what to reveal and how. For a long time I didn’t want to burden others with my “inner landscape” as May Sarton called it, but I’m learning how to put some cracks in my self-imposed silence. Poetry is a chisel.
You effectively use the outer world to expose and illuminate inner landscapes of feeling. Yet you are a scientist and naturalist. When in your biography did the natural world become a portal to imagination and personal knowing?
My day job has nothing to do with ecology—I’m a crisis advocate at a domestic violence shelter. But the natural world is what feeds my soul and gives me the inner strength to cope with the vicarious trauma I encounter on the job. In the past year or so I’ve done hours of reading and studying about ecology, building my own curriculum. Trying to learn everything I can about this gorgeous world.
Nature is a place of healing and centering. I walk into the woods and know exactly who I am. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember—some of my earliest memories are of walking with my grandmother through the trails behind our home. Nature has always been how I discover more of myself.
I taught children for a long time, and am fairly versed in basic botany, but in your work I encountered beautiful, new-to-me vocabulary. “Marcescence,”“catalpa,” and “grama” brought out my dictionary app. How do you decide when to use botanical words and when to describe something through the senses?
I love collecting new-to-me words from nature. It makes my poetry better and opens my eyes to more of the world. So many poets make the case for nature as thesaurus. Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes to mind. She’s talked about her writing process as being part scientific research—with every new organism comes a new, rich word bank. A diversity of species is a diversity of meaning; not all birds are created equal. In a poem, names matter—a crane means something different from a crow.
The question of naming or not naming is, to me, about respect. When I write of an organism, plant or animal, I want to be clear it’s not just set dressing for the poem, but an essential component. If I have an emotional experience in a meadow, the grasses and birds in that meadow are my witnesses—they experience it with me. So if I write a poem about it, I must consider the thoughts and perspectives of the grasses and birds.
The final lines of “An Untouched Forest” are gorgeous. The poem follows an intimate portrait of a relationship with a landscape—”apostrophe myself against an elm” being a favorite line. But it ends with a reluctance to reveal oneself in a human relationship. The vulnerability and (hinted at) violence are palpable. Please talk about your intention and the process of writing this piece.
What parts of myself do I keep private because I want them to be “just mine?” Which do I keep private because I’m afraid to reveal them? This poem lives in the middle of that tension. There is always a risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable—we risk rejection, contempt, or worse. Obviously that risk is compounded for people who hold marginalized identities. Before we disclose even our more innocuous secrets, we have to know that those secrets will be honored, held safe. There’s a grief when you realize you aren’t safe to share your deepest truths with someone who claims to love you. This poem was a way to unburden myself while expressing that grief. There’s gratitude in it, too, for the plant beings I relied on for comfort and nurturing during that time.
These four poems are the first you’ve had published. MSR is so pleased to be the journal that introduces your lush and weighty work. You call yourself an emerging poet—please share your path into poetry and where you wish to take it next.
I’m so thrilled that these poems have found a home in Mud Season Review! I’ve only been submitting for a few months now, and I truly did not expect publication to come so soon. What I mean by “emerging” poet is that I’ve only recently begun to submit my work. Poetry’s always been important in my life. I’ve been writing since grade school, and I was heavily involved in the slam poetry scene through high school. I stopped writing or reading poetry for several years, and it was only last summer that I started to write poems again.
I’ve been writing a lot of place-based poems about my home landscape. Over the next year I’d like to complete a residency—or just banish myself to the woods for a week—with the end goal being a chapbook or manuscript draft. All these Nebraska poems really want to share a house.
