Sealey Challenge Day 7: Trophic Cascade
Channeling Mother Earth
Camille T. Dungy was one of the first names recommended to me to begin my journey into ecopoetry, and her collection Trophic Cascade represents an approach I’ve already begun—exploring how experiences of motherhood and domesticity overlap with the processes of the natural world.
I recently read that the word “ecopoetry” is a combination of oikos (household/family) and poïesis (making/creating/producing), which resonates with my own obsessions with domesticity and the natural world. Do we feel at home in our natural world, or insist on mastering it, on beating it into submission? Watching my husband tackle the weeds that have grown high as the house, clinging to the brick, because I’ve asked him to—I have to check my tendency towards these dichotomies. But Dungy’s poems ground us in the truth of our dependence on, and duty to, both nature and our own progeny. Aren’t they the same?
I love the strategies in her poems: She includes a series of “Frequently Asked Questions” poems, which respond to questions about her identity as a black mother with poems that often reflect on the natural world; a series of Ars Poeticas in homage to various aspects of creation (both nature and our need to order; but also utilizes space in many of the poems in a way that feels “erratic.” There’s a tension between the orderly poems and those with looser line placement that mimics the chaos/order dichotomy.
This collection includes “Characteristics of Life,” a poem that implicates all of us who may flirt with ambivalence concerning climate change; “Frequently Asked Questions: #10,” addressing black identity through the vehicle of grackles; and a poem I’m drawn to, “Notes on what is always with us,” which I love for its juxtapositions of fact and experience, the unobtrusive way the poem is a record of her attempt to articulate something ineffable:
