ON THE TRAIL WITH AHD

VERMONT REFLECTIONS

UPCOMING EVENTS

2 PM, NOVEMBER 1^st at Peregrine Books, Prescott, Arizona. A reading to celebrate my two new books: Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower and The Gift of Animals.

7 PM, NOVEMBER 5^th at Wick Poetry Center, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio

The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Reading: Featuring Alison Hawthorne Deming & Terry Belew celebrating the publication of Terry Belew’s award-winning collection The Deep Blue of Neptune. Kent Student Center Ballroom Balcony, 1075 Risman Dr, Kent, Ohio 44242

Cold Hollow Mountains, East Enosburg, Vermont

VERMONT: A TWO-PART REFLECTION

1.

When I left Grand Manan this fall for my return trip to Arizona, I spent a few days in northern Vermont—a time of encounter with my former self and reflection about our shared future. I’d been invited by Neil Shepard to Sundog Poetry’s “Symposium on Environmental Poetry in the Time of Climate Crisis.” I was to join poets Jody Gladding and Jane Hirshfield, writer/scholar John Elder, and pioneer of the tree canopy/botanist Nalini Nadkarni to speak about poetry and science. An irresistible invitation, given the opportunity to read and think alongside these gifted minds.

I had a few hours before I needed to bed down in Burlington, so I drove up to Franklin County in the northwest corner of the state to visit my old haunts. I moved there in 1969 when I was twenty-three and my daughter was four. I had dropped out of Brown University (then the women’s branch called Pembroke College) and was dead broke. Shotgun teenage marriage was over. I was terrified of nuclear proliferation and had rehearsed the apocalypse too many times to not think it was a real possibility. I was shaken by the violence of the Vietnam War and the racial violence raging through the southern states, and political violence that had touched me when I lived in Cambridge for a few years and the anti-antiwar vigilantes were out patrolling the streets in their Army helmets. I’d dated an organizer for SNCC for a while. He’d helped register Blacks in the South for the vote. He had educated me into how racist the nation was and turned me on to James Baldwin. I was an innocent, despite the judgement and shunning I’d experienced as a teenage mother. I wanted out of a culture that was so cruel and corrupt. I looked on the map for the largest area of wild land, a place far from what I had seen to be targets for nukes, and I found this forlorn county where small dairy farms struggled to hang on and urban exiles bought up the farms that failed—kids ourselves trying to reinvent ourselves, strengthening ourselves on winters that offered weeks of weather stuck at forty below with snowbanks taller than our cars edging the dirt roads. I still remember how the hard-packed snow on those roads would squeak in the cold under foot.

Birthday 1972. Massive sugar maple with burl across the road from the red house. I think the drummer Skeeter Camera took this picture.

We made food co-ops and alternative schools, did whatever shit work we could find, grew organic gardens, made apple cider and maple syrup, raised a pig and some hens. It was a loose community, though I mostly felt like a solitary. I had a one-thousand-dollar U.S. Savings Bond my grandmother had bought for me when I was born. I bought a house, barn and three acres of land for $4500. It was a dump and so was I. Our house looked out on the forested bowl of the Cold Hollow Mountains and that land harbored and healed me, while I struggled to find my way through the thicket of my own ruin.

The red house, 2025

Half a century later, I drove by the old house, astonished to think who I had been and how beautiful this improvised life has turned out to be for both me and my daughter. Of course, she has had her own self-inventions to weather, and our hardships gave her burdens to carry. But here was our house all fixed up, tended and remodeled and radiating a sense of belonging and love, the Cold Hollow Mountains still pillowed with deciduous forest, a deep quiet to its contours. Seeing the house, I felt no envy or remorse, only gratitude that someone had made the place work, had loved it and given it the care it required to be a home. I drove off to be once again the public self I’ve become as a writer, carrying with me a renewed gratitude for the land that had mothered me while I was learning to be a mother.

2.

A recording with readings and panel discussion of the Sundog Symposium will be available soon. I will post that when the time comes. For now, I’ll leave you with my opening remarks for the gathering.

ENVIRONMENTAL POETRY IN THE TIME OF CLIMATE CRISIS

We were in a very different place as a society a year ago when Neil Shepard and I began discussing our hopes for this gathering. What we felt then as an urgency has now become an emergency. Both art and science are being defunded, eroded, censored, silenced, betrayed. Medical research shutdown. Climate science denied. Environmental protections crushed. Laws shredded. Words banned from the federal lexicon: “climate change,” “emissions,” when these very words are a crash course in the advance of an ecocide being committed in the interests of the wealthy few for whom too much is never enough. The daily barrage of cruelties, injustices, and humiliations of our national identity on the world stage are enough to put a person in a state of perpetual outrage or numbness.

In times of profound change people turn to poetry for meaning and community, as former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith has written: “One of poetry’s great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image -- things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why--is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.” Poets have always known the ground truth of ecology: everything is connected. It’s a pointless act to ban words. They are our collective possession. We have a lot of other words, and we have our freedom of speech—though it’s coming at a higher cost for many of our neighbors and kin. We are here today to celebrate poetry and science—two of the very best instruments we have for knowing where we’re at and where we need to go—and to explore how we might go about that in alliance.

Science generates new knowledge, its method based upon verifiable evidence. It asks a question then tries to figure out how to answer that question in a manner that can be verified and repeated by others. We are living in the age of science. We need science to deal with the challenges and complexity of the world we have made. But how do we speak of the feelings and thought experiments that new findings in science induce in us, the wow factor of learning that a slime mold can create a map of the Tokyo subway system? How do we speak of the technological marvel of the James Webb Space Telescope, the work of twenty thousand people in fourteen countries collaborating for over twenty years. And this at a time when it seems impossible for people to work together for the common good. How do we speak of our empathy for those who suffer? How do we speak of the sublime beauty that abounds in nature? Is the perception of beauty a form of knowledge?

In the face of the challenge of climate change, an upwelling of poetry and science collaborations are emerging—not only poets finding the language of science a source of inspiration, but increasingly scientists seeking out poets. Longer standing experiments include Long Term Ecological Research sites such as the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, CERN (the large Hadron collider near Geneva), the National Science Foundation’s Antarctica residencies, and poetry installations in zoos and natural history museums. Call it a community of the curious, experimenting with new ways of scientific storytelling, of discovering the songs in science.

Many scientists understand that they can—and must--so a better job at communicating their findings to the public. In no matter is this more important than climate change that effects every living being on this gorgeous and wounded planet. “It’s all about global warming,” writes C.D. Wright in Casting Deep Shade. “We are the asteroid.” Poetry can help scientists communicate with broader audiences; poetry can explore ethical and aesthetic dimensions of scientific discoveries; poetry can dwell in uncertainty without grasping for facile truths or lies to cover up the truth; poetry can bring wonder back to minds fatigued with information overload; poetry can give voice to those without voice (“Ask me if I speak for snail,” writes Camille Dungy in her poem “Characteristics of Life,” “and I will tell you I speak for the snail. . . I speak for the damselfly. . . I speak for the moon jelly”); poetry can aestheticize data and weave it into a cultural context. Plus, it’s just fun and downright fascinating for poets to hang out with scientists who are passionate about their work—and who, because they are supposed to screen out their passion in their professional writing, take pleasure in our nonscientist astonishment.

And science contributes to aesthetic experience—to questions of beauty, “questions that science does not ask,” writes Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, “not because they aren’t important, but because science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task.” The universe becomes more beautiful after Galileo enhances our ability to see it with his telescope. The elephant is more beautiful after we understand that it experiences grief and communicates with low frequency vocalizations across long distances. Aesthetic experience explores new language for bringing together ways of knowing; questions what we know and how we know it; confesses our failures and ignorance and quest for healing; shares our anxiety and grief; educates our empathy; finds the songs in science. Kim Stanley Robinson, the great science fiction novelist, says that it is the role of the arts and humanities to aim science. How brazen for a poet to think about “aiming” science.