Hi All,
How are you? It’s been a good week on my side. I launched the Poetic Library Spotlight Series to grow and unify Substack’s poetic community. This project will release monthly interviews with your favourite poets and host Zoom sessions for us to examine poems in our Library and use these as a springboard for our very own Poetic Library writing sessions.
Enough of that for now. Today’s poem is one close to my heart. Do you know those poems that are born from your pen and write themselves? This one took my pen from me and wrote it before me. I was a bystander.
Spring’s cycles were on my mind. What formed was a poem that takes on these cycles to merge the bodily with the ecological. This poem is also accompanied by an essay on this subject. If you enjoy this post please consider subscribing (or upgrading to paid) to support more work like this.
Spring
An egg with a seed, I cracked it open And there - a tree. I planted it - A flower grew - An egg at its centre - bulbous. I ate the egg - Fried it with chillies Plated it with A seeded slice. Later, I found a shoot Growing in my tongue. I plucked it My tongue went too. I planted the tongue (pink in the earth) And a new tree And a new flower - Petals parted With a tongue at their centre. I ate the tongue (pink in my mouth). Later, my tongue grew anew. I found an egg with a seed I cracked it open I ate it I lost my tongue I planted it I grew I ate I planted. I grew. I ate.
In this poem, I wanted to push the reader into a connection with the ‘natural’, the ecological or non-human living environment. Ecopoetics and attempts to connect the human to the natural can sometimes verge on the puritanical. Sublimity and beauty are put at the forefront, and the uglier, more horrific are left on the sidelines. I noted this in my recent piece, which called for a focus on horror and fearful aspects of nature to preserve the creativity they fuel.
Here, I, again, challenge the romantic representations of nature in poetry whilst simultaneously trying to draw an affiliation between the non-human and the human. This is done through both content and form. The narrator works with the seasons, cyclically eating, growing and losing as the poem progresses. The bodily and the natural merge - the tongue grows a tree. Additionally, though, the ecological and the animal converges too - the egg contains a tree seed, and the flowers contain an egg. It is not just, then, the amalgamation of the nonhuman and the human, but rather the animal and the non-animal (the ecological environment). The human is then also placed in proximity to nature by behaving in the same way as the animal - both forms join and birth with the environment.
I chose to focus on the tongue instead of perhaps the womb or something closer metaphorically or literally to an egg because I wanted to achieve a viscerality - to provoke disgust or discomfort. The tongue does this well because of its connection to sex, food and speech. In many ways, it is at the centre of our living; thus, it also seems apt to place this at the centre of a poem exploring the connection between humans and nature.
Note that the images accompanying this piece also attempt to further provoke and blur these boundaries.
I hope you enjoyed this piece. If you did, please consider subscribing (or upgrading to paid) to support more work like this.
Really nice. The tongue image also resonated with poetry for me.
I like the imagination that went into making this poem. It is quite inventive and fun to read. It has its surprises and its poetic moments. Good read!
By the way, I invite you to read my poetry. You might find some poems interesting and thus worthy of your time. If you think that this is something that you would like to follow, please, become a paid subscriber if it is within your financial means. If not, You will honor me by just reading.