Resisting, Remaking

In her introduction to the January 2016 Poetry, poet and editor Melissa Tuckey describes her work on the forthcoming Ghost Fishing: An Ecojustice Poetry Anthology:

The anthology began as a quest to understand how poetry responds to environmental and social crises. I looked for poems that contained the complexity of this ecological moment and a social consciousness—an awareness that environmental crisis is social and political crisis. I sought out voices that have long been under-represented among nature poetry collections: those of people of color and those of low-income populations, whose environmental situations are often the most dire.

“Environmental crisis is social and political crisis”: the categories overlap powerfully in the January issue. Brenda Hillman’s “Describing Tattoos to a Cop” is about injustice, but it’s also about the environment, and the ways the two intertwine:

                    We’d been squatting     near the worms
            in the White House lawn, protesting
the Keystone Pipeline =$=$=$=$=$=$=>>;
            i could sense      the dear worms
   through    the grillwork fence,
            twists & coils   of flexi-script, remaking
the soil    by resisting it

These lines provide a “grillwork” of their own, neatly linking all their components. The speaker, squatting low, invites comparisons to the “dear worms,” and the worms—“twists & coils of flexi-script”—recall poetry (including these coiling lines). They recall activists, too, who similarly remake the world by resisting it. Here, the speaker protests the Keystone Pipeline, a less beneficial project for the soil than the crucial work of earthworms. Hillman renders the pipeline in a playfully symbolic “flexi-script” of her own, one that leaves no doubt about her perception of the project.

Connecting activists to worms—which might seem insulting in another context—here suggests that even the evidently disempowered can change the world. “Disempowered” soon defines the speaker, who finds herself in a cop car, “our ziplocked handcuffs / pretty tight.” Now that “grillwork” refers not just to the White House fence that keeps the protesters out, but also to other constraints that lock them in.

After an officer asks if the speaker has tattoos, she describes them, including an “alchemical sign on my ankle”:

                                                       Ash
Wednesday in our nation’s capital.     Dead
               grass, spring trees
about to burst, two officers
           beside the newish van. Inside,
              alchemical notes for the next time —

On Ash Wednesday, believers get “tattooed” with ash, and clergy traditionally recite some variation of the Old Testament lines “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”—an idea that might resonate with a speaker who crouches among earthworms. These lines capture the apparent alchemy of spring, when dead grass comes back to life, and when trees burst into flower. Social change can resemble another kind of alchemy—one that activists practice by resisting and remaking.

Similarly, Danez Smith’s long excerpt from “summer, somewhere” responds to injustice—the epidemic of gun violence against African-American males—by delving into the earth. This sad and fantastical poem imagines a universe populated by murdered black men and boys, and there, as in the last poem, soil is associated with both life and death, regeneration and degeneration. Each morning

                                                   we dig

a new boy from the ground, take
him out his treebox, shake worms

from his braids.

Usually a site of burial, the ground is now a site of rebirth—perhaps a nod to the ancient Greek belief in people who sprang, fully formed, from the earth. This world is one of opposites, where, quite literally, black is white (“if snow fell, it’d fall black”). And it’s also a bittersweet twist on the oft-said line “he’s in a better place”: “don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better.” The proof? “we go out for sweets & come back.”

The denizens of this world don’t just dig boys out of the ground; they also “pluck[…] brothers from branches.” If the first image harkened to manmade violence while also alluding to natural processes (the worms, the “treebox”), this one works similarly, alluding at once to lynching and to a longed-for world where boys—rather than getting cut down—might grow on trees.

Boys meld with nature in other ways, too:

                    watch the rain melt everything
into a boy with brown eyes & wet naps — 

the lake turns into a boy in the rain
the swamp — a boy in the rain

the fields of lavender — brothers
dancing between the storm.

Rather than feeling threatened or alienated by their environment, these boys are their environment: could a greater sense of belonging be possible? Here, “everything” is a black boy, including the lake, the swamps, the fields—and just as the rain melts everything into a boy, so does it seem to melt these lines’ grammar, which becomes slick and slippery. By equating the boys with nature, Smith highlights the outrageous unnaturalness of their deaths.

He concludes:

    here —

how could I ever explain to you — 

 

someone prayed we’d rest in peace

& here we are
 

in peace             whole                all summer

The last line is laden with complexity: the boys are “in peace” and “whole,” yet “peace” inevitably brings to mind its homonym “piece.” Are the boys whole, or in pieces—blown up by the world they left, the world we still live in? As for “all summer”: does the phrase mean their whole world is characterized by summer, or that they’re at peace just for a single season—the length, perhaps, of a fantasy, or a poem?