Thomas R. Smith

Thomas R. Smith on “Zebra Mussel” and “The Cecropia Cocoon”

Both of my poems in this issue, “Zebra Mussel” and “The Cecropia Cocoon,” are intentionally discomfort-inducing.  While it’s true that, as Donald Hall has perceptively noted, energy in the poem can be generated by setting formal pleasure at odds with non-pleasurable content, I think that the energy in these two poems, such as it is, proceeds from a moral anguish born of our failure to protect the environment and an accompanying dread of the price coming due just a little farther down the road.

I had read about zebra mussels for years before actually experiencing them at a northern Minnesota lake a few summers ago.  At one beach swimmers were advised to wear water shoes to protect their feet from the slashing edges of these tiny creatures’ shells, which were everywhere.  And while the zebra mussels were ubiquitous, there was almost nothing else living in that water, so thoroughly had the mussels scoured the lake bottom.  If there’s a larger point this poem is trying to make, it arrives in the last few lines: “My heart becomes a wet stone / sinking in dismay at how one / so small can desolate its world.”  When you consider how minute we humans truly are in relation to the planet, it’s perfectly OK with me if you choose to substitute accordingly.

Human beings of course must own some agency in the spread of the zebra mussel and other invasive species.  None of these species, though, can compare with our own for sheer global destructiveness.  At the center of “The Cecropia Cocoon” is a truly nauseating moment of culpability which I hoped the poem might at least symbolically expiate.  It’s our moments of unconsciousness that ultimately do us in no matter how responsibly aware we try to be the rest of the time.  I’ve usually found that the small and specific detail provides the most accessible doorway into larger, otherwise overwhelming concerns—in this way, the sticky mess in the jar in our back entry led relentlessly to the problem of our continuing careless abuse of the planet, now demonically ramped up by the most nakedly anti-environmentalist president in our lifetime.  I should mention that in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard tells the story of a magnificent Polyphemus moth hatched in a schoolroom jar that didn’t allow enough space for its wings to properly unfold.  This pathetically thwarted creature traumatized the young Dillard and has haunted my imagination as well, no doubt lending my Cecropia story an added jolt of horror by association.

As I point out in my forthcoming prose book Poetry on the Side of Nature (Folded Word Press), the “secret” subject of nature poetry is often—and increasingly—the felt distance between the poet and his or her subject.  In “Zebra Mussel” I attempt through empathy to close the distance I feel between myself and the mussel, though with limited success; my sense of revulsion is too strong to meet the zebra mussel even halfway.  In “The Cecropia Cocoon” an assumption of closeness to nature is shaken by a dramatization of my unthinking neglect.  The poem leaves me in an appropriate grief that I hope will serve to remind of our urgent obligation to care for earthly life of every species.  We could wish the same for all our necessarily discomfiting nature poems.

Gwendolyn Ann Hill

Gwendolyn Ann Hill on “Cross-Kingdom Transplant”

The poem “Cross-Kingdom Transplant” was inspired by actual science—an article, titled “Crossing kingdoms: Using decellularized plants as perfusable tissue engineering scaffolds,” published in Biomaterials in May 2017, and the subsequent Popular Science story that showed a video of a decellularized spinach leaf carrying, what I assume to be, water dyed red to look like blood. 

Many of my poems borrow from cutting-edge science—from discoveries that I find almost unbelievable, discoveries the scientific community may not yet be ready to embrace fully. I like to stay surprised by science, to think about how science, too, is a human construct and therefore its “truths” tell us a lot about what we are willing to believe in any given time period. Scientific facts have been used through the years to justify racism and to discredit Indigenous belief systems, and have also been used to cure diseases and rehabilitate ecosystems. Science isn’t inherently good or bad, but fallible and imperfect, like any human creation. Because what is true changes as time passes, I insist on staying slightly skeptical of scientific “fact,” while simultaneously opening myself to the most radical scientific possibility, and I think poetry is the perfect place to explore the tension between belief and disbelief.

Because the science in this poem is already sort of unbelievable, one of my biggest concerns was honoring the actual science accurately, as well as honoring the language of science—the sounds of the words—to stay with reality as much as possible. I want the reader to feel like I’m pushing reality, not taking a giant leap outside of it, and that starts with using authentic language found in the article and describing the processes in as much detail as possible, while still creating imagery and using line breaks to make that language and those processes feel more poetic. For a long time, my mentor and I went back and forth with this poem, with him trying to cut out process descriptions while I insisted they stay, because they help ground the poem. I was trying to cement as much belief in the reader as I could from the very beginning, and I felt that I had to show that I understood the science first and foremost, in order to suspend disbelief.

While the science described by this article and video is very real, I also imagined carrying the idea of tissue engineering scaffolds further into the future, into their possible implications, to amplify wonder and play with disbelief. How far could I go with this science before what I imagined would no longer be possible? What might be possible, in the future of this scientific discovery, that isn’t possible yet? Would there someday be whole hearts built out of plant tissue? 

I also brought it home to a backyard garden, to make it more tangible. How real and everyday could I make this science feel? What if one of those hearts were inside me? What if it were built from plants that I myself grew? 

I don’t just think pushing the reality of science, using imagination and poetry, is fun—I think it’s vital. We have to be able to imagine future worlds, future possibilities, that are beyond our immediate understanding. Imagining future technologies is only one piece of that puzzle. I don’t believe that the world will be saved by technology alone. Pushing the reality of science is also about questioning a colonial system, a system that we depend on and have to use wisely if there is to be any sort of survivable future, but also a system that is too often hierarchical and atomistic. I’m not just asking the readers of this poem to believe something that is difficult to believe, I’m asking them to see science differently—as something that we can take all the best parts of to use, while leaving what is no longer useful behind. 

Brittney Corrigan

Of Walls and Wings

By Brittney Corrigan

I wrote the poem “Sanctuary” as the debate over funding for Trump’s border wall heated up in February, 2019. With the looming possibility of another government shutdown and the president's hubristic declaration of a national emergency, I was drawn to the story of the wall construction that threatened the National Butterfly Center, a private 100-acre nature and wildlife sanctuary in Mission, Texas, which is home to 240 species of butterflies. It is situated across the threshold of the border in the Rio Grande Valley, part of a six-mile stretch of land in the wall’s path, along with several other sacred sites, endangered wildlife habitats, and longtime residents. Many local communities were fighting to protect this stretch of land from the intrusion of the wall, including a local congressman who managed to block construction with a last minute budget provision. Unfortunately, it didn’t hold.

After a district judge rejected suits against it from the federal government as well as the National Butterfly Center, the three-and-a-half mile Rio Grande Valley wall was constructed. In addition, citizens who support the border wall have founded an organization to continue the project with private donations. Marianna Treviño-Wright, the director of the butterfly refuge, has been outspoken in opposition to the wall and its effect on the local area, which she describes as being turned into a “war zone”. 

I felt drawn to write about what the construction of the wall says not only about our current government’s lack of regard for the land, the people, and the endangered wildlife it puts in jeopardy but also what it means logistically and symbolically to those who wish to immigrate to the United States. I wanted to use the metamorphosis of a butterfly as a metaphor for the current situation at the U.S./Mexico border.

When a caterpillar reaches the chrysalis stage of its transformation, what happens inside that shell is nothing short of remarkable. The caterpillar does not simply sprout wings and become a butterfly. Its entire body liquifies, releasing enzymes to digest itself and dissolve all of its tissues. Highly organized groups of cells called imaginal discs survive the process and go through rapid cell division, using the remaining protein-rich soup as fuel, to become the new butterfly that eventually emerges.

Thinking about the many endangered butterflies at the Texas sanctuary, I imagined their vulnerability as their bodies changed from one form to another in the shadow of the construction of the wall. As I wrote, I also held in my consciousness the fate of the many refugees at the border, attempting their own transformation of their lives in the face of so many barriers and such hatred. This poem is meant as a plea for the safety of all those lives struggling at the US/Mexico border.

Janine Certo

Janine Certo on “How to Haunt Humans”

I’ve always loved poems about animals, but that piqued in 2003 after I read what remains my favorite poetry collection to this day. Robert Wrigley’s Lives of the Animals. The speaker’s inquiry into the animal world is marked by a respect and a nuanced observation where in many of the poems, the tables are turned. Animal now regards human. 

I wrote “How to Haunt Humans” in the summer of 2019. I’d just finished Matthieu Ricard’s well-researched book, A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion. The text rails against the anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition and argues what I’ve known since childhood. If one lacks compassion toward animals, one lacks compassion toward human beings as well. At the same time, like many SRR readers, I was digesting the myriad articles about how our planet is losing new species daily. I wanted to join the chorus of writers who have written about how we have harmed-exploited-neglected-underestimated animals, and what the implications might be. 

As I wrote, I quickly realized the poem worked better as a hybrid piece. It was liberating to imagine some hyper-intelligent animal narrating a reference guide for other animals. As one might imagine, earlier drafts were lengthier with guide entries from A-Z. I’m sure readers will be able to think of their own entries.  

Of course, “How to Haunt Humans” was written before COVID-19. Before this collective crisis we are all experiencing. A wise friend recently emailed me: “The Yunnan Box Turtle reference in the poem is specifically haunting right now as we humans experience the animal virus and see Spring and her indifferent animal life taking its same pleasures now during our isolation.”