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Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.
Hello, this is Deborah Backel Schmidt, here with my friend and neighbor Sue Boudreaux, your hosts for Follow A Fish, the poetry conversation and inspiration podcast. It is such a gift to be able to share and discuss our poetry each week, and we really enjoy the directions that our conversations take us. We're also very much enjoying our live open mic series which launched February 15 at The Good Earth here in El Sobrante in which we are hoping will become a monthly event. Our next one will be this Sunday.
Sue:As in today, right? This will be
Deborah:released today. Today, Sunday, March 15 at 03:30. For more info, out our website at curiositypodcasts.com. Today, we continue the theme of restoring nature. Last time we read Sue's poem Spring Breaks School, which brought up some interesting questions about rewilding.
Deborah:Today, I will share my poem Wild. Urban people that we are, we think the wild is something far, as set apart in spirit as in place. A destination, coral reef, rainforest, mountain peak, both distant and diminished, under threat. And yet, while we're asleep, night creatures prowl the landscapes that we call our own. The brave coyote, fox, and owl come out to hunt the city canyons and the silent parks, the dewy darkness of our still backyards.
Deborah:While divided from us just by skin, integument so brief and thin as all the wilderness within, the seeth of blood and bone of synapse sinew still unknown, untamed, its every rhythm owning us kin to all the beings of the wild.
Sue:Oh Deborah, that was such a beautiful poem. When I read it first, I had to send you a little personal message to say how I particularly loved and enjoyed it. And I'm so with you with how you see the wild and us that we are part of nature not as separate as our busy tech filled lives belie. And I also feel the wilderness right by the house as we both live here at the WUI, the wild land urban interface with our fingers of human habitation reaching into animal habitat. You paint a dreamlike picture of creatures dipping in and out of our consciousness, in and out of our actual gardens and shadows beyond the fences.
Sue:I particularly loved the rhyme within line. It's not a traditional a b a b pattern, but rather surprising and oddly satisfying. I'm always impressed with poems that rhyme in a way that does not constrain the central thread of meaning where the meaning is key but with a little tweak it can be made to be even more pleasurable and memorable to read and particularly to read aloud. The assonance of rainforest mountain peak both distant and diminished under threat is so effective Distant and diminished exactly. Sitting in front of a gorgeous and poignant documentary, it's so easy to get overwhelmed with the enormity of the problem.
Sue:I also loved while divided from us just by skin intergumen so brief and thin. It's a beautiful way of showing how we're part of nature, part of the evolutionary tree and the ecosystem. The under the surface similarities are so interesting and surprising. A bird's wing, if you think about a chicken wing you're about to bite into and that little nub on the top, that's equivalent to our thumb. And take a look at your hands.
Sue:Horses hoofs are the thickened long finger, long fingernail, your middle finger. Amazing. Our evolutionary past and shared ancestry is as you say just beneath the skin. So I'm really curious what prompted you to write this? Where were you?
Sue:What was going on in your life at the time? If you'd like to share that and if it's relevant to the creation of this particularly lovely poem.
Deborah:Thank you Sue. Sure. This was actually a response to a call for submissions by the Marin Poetry Center. They do an anthology every couple of years and this one, the theme was wild. And I just thought, I'm going to just sit down and write and see what comes out.
Deborah:And that's where it took me. I was at home where I sit and write I'm usually looking out into the backyard.
Sue:I was actually going to stop you for a second because you've mentioned a couple of times the idea of a prompt. An external prompt actually helping you to write some really beautiful stuff. I mean it doesn't always just come from within right? Right and I
Deborah:think there's no shame in that. We have such. We've sort of bought into the idea that only good poetry is inspired by the muse right that unless you're inspired you're not going to write anything good but actually prompts can be super helpful and you might not like everything you write in response to a prompt but it can almost always take you somewhere really interesting.
Sue:Were saying about, before I rudely interrupted you, you were saying about this prompt.
Deborah:Yeah, so I often write sitting, looking out into the backyard, and our backyard is inhabited by all kinds of critters when we're not there. We find kinds of evidence in the morning of raccoons and possums. One day I remember I went out and I left the compost bucket sitting in the backyard just collecting yard clippings and a little baby possum had fallen in. So I just tipped it out and off he ran, hopefully to be reunited with his family. So, you know, and I've seen films people take with their wild cams set in their backyards of all the gooders who come.
Deborah:Little do we know about coyotes and foxes and yeah. And actually, there's not just fancy camera traps, but also just your security cameras. Sure. Yeah, exactly. I'm really tempted to set up a camera actually.
Deborah:I would love to know what is going on in there in the nighttime. And at the same time I had just read a poem called Dark by Jericho Brown. It was selected by Rita Dove for the poem column in the New York Times Magazine, which I don't think they have anymore at the moment. I'm not really sure actually. And this poem had blues lines embedded within free verse.
Deborah:So the rhythm and the rhyme were somewhat obscured, but it was just such an effective technique. This poem, as I started to write it, took itself in the direction of blank verse, I decided to honor. So that's five beats per line. But then within the five I was playing with a recurrent rhyme that occurred every four stresses.
Sue:So this has much more of a structure than I had thought.
Deborah:Perhaps it's not a formally defined structure but it does have the five beats per line and then there's the intermittent internal rhyme that you picked out and some of that internal rhyme does follow this every four beats pattern. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll link in the show notes to that poem by Jericho Brown called Dark.
Sue:Thank you. Yes. Yes, we will. Once you had written the first draft of it, how
Deborah:did you hone it? I think that's where I really once it had defined itself as an iambic pentameter poem five beats per line. Going back and reading Jericho Brown's poem and just figuring out what I could do with it.
Sue:So you talked about this thing with having some lyrics. Was it lyrics or was it sound between the lines?
Deborah:You mean in Jericho Brown's Yes.
Sue:Uh-huh.
Deborah:Well, he wrote lines that follow the rhythm of a blues poem. But then when he wrote them out, he didn't write them with the lines ending where they would if you were writing out a blues lyric. Mhmm. He wrapped them around in interesting ways so you have to work a little bit to find them.
Sue:Is there a genre of poetry where you take someone else's either lyrics or poem and you interleave your words Yes. With What's that? What is that?
Deborah:Well as far as I know other people may do this as well, I was introduced to this by Jack Foley, who's a wonderful Berkeley poet who just passed away this past year. And he calls it writing between the lines.
Sue:Oh! Yeah! Because it feels like strands of smoke weaving together. What an interesting idea.
Deborah:It's a beautiful way to get yourself going and you may find that what you've written between the lines stands by itself or you may want to publish it as alternating. My friend Mary Eichbauer got the idea of italicizing the interleaved lines so that they can be seen more easily. I think I ended up italicizing and insetting them, just tabbing them in so that you could really see like one poem here interleaved with another. And Jack has done side by side poems as well that can also be interleaved.
Sue:And then I guess a way to start with that is sometimes to take a line from a poem from somebody else's poem. I remember one that was said that was something like over the horizons forever. Mhmm. And I was like,
Deborah:woah. And
Sue:you know from that a whole poem came to me. So that would be another nice, another interesting way to start that's a little bit less involved. And also I would imagine that the permissions are a bit complicated if you take someone else's work. You'd need to be careful about publishing that without permission, right?
Deborah:I suppose yeah, if you published it you'd have to get permission to republish the original poem as well But no such permission issue exists for epigraphs, which are the quotes that you can use at the head of your poem that inspire the whole poem. So that is really loose and open and fun to do. Oh, great. That's really good to know because otherwise you get so hung up
Sue:with it. You're like I'm not even gonna. Yeah. So did you have anything else to add about that or? No.
Sue:So how do you feel about the state of nature right now?
Deborah:Oh my god I agonize about it. I'm so worried but at the same time I do see possibilities and I see the light so I'm all about going there.
Sue:What do you see as some real possibilities for alleviating the threats to nature that you share in your poem? Well there are a
Deborah:couple in particular that come to mind. There's a project called the Wild Yards Project and we can link to that in the show notes as well.
Sue:I think you have a notice about that in your garden.
Deborah:Well that's a different one, I'll get to that in a minute. But Wild Yards is based on the premise that if you add up all of the private yard space that we have in this country alone, it's a huge proportion of land. And if we're all about rewilding nature or reducing the human footprint, we have a huge capacity built in right there if we each act within our own little space that we do have control over. It's huge. So there are lots and lots of tips for you at Wild Yards Project.
Deborah:And the other one that you mentioned Sue, I do have a sign up in my yard and I'm not the only one in the neighborhood to do so. There's a program through the National Wildlife Foundation called what is it called create and certify certified wildlife habitat program and it's very much an honor based system where you go online and you fill out a questionnaire about your yard answering questions like do I provide insect cover, for example fallen leaves? Do I provide nesting space for birds? Do I provide habitat for other wildlife? Do I provide food sources like fruit trees or vegetables?
Deborah:Do I provide water source? And then of course you're not using any chemicals. So it's easy to answer the questions and you might find yourself that you're already a long way along toward being certified. There might be one or more other two or three things that you wanna fulfill before you fill out the certification. And then when you do, you just send it in and you decide which kind of sign you want.
Deborah:And then you get the certification to post on your lawn. I think it's great because it makes people notice and ask questions like how can I do that? What did she do? Right, right.
Sue:And I also think it adds into that idea that biodiversity is not something that just naturally happens. Yeah. Biodiversity means the number of different species in an area. Mhmm. And the more biodiverse an area is, the more resilient it is to changes.
Sue:Yeah. So that that's really cool on a micro level. I actually hadn't realized it was quite that straightforward. I thought, oh, it's way beyond my reach. I could never do that But because I'm not a master I'm looking at all the weeds in my back garden and I'm
Deborah:like Weeds are good. Leaf litter is
Sue:great. And then, but then there's also the tension with the defensible space and wildfire.
Deborah:This is true.
Sue:And so this is quite an interesting dilemma. You know, how do you clear space back from your house without completely ruining a lot of habitat? And the answer is, you know, you'd be sensible about it, I guess. Yeah. There are ways to have things that aren't bushes going up your house that you can have them further away.
Deborah:You can have bushes further away. That's right. I'm just going through now and creating my five foot perimeter of hardscaping, and that's a big job. It is. That's big job.
Sue:I've got a chainsaw.
Deborah:I'm just saying. May need that chainsaw. Yeah, but then beyond that five feet, there's a lot of room for right growth, right?
Sue:I was wondering my final question to you is, you know, ideally what role could or does poetry and perhaps art more generally pay play towards making a brighter future for nature and for us?
Deborah:I think it's all about visioning and possibility and being hopeful for the future so that if we see what is possible in a poem or a piece of artwork that creates room for us to grow in the future. The doom and gloom is necessary and a lot of it is true, but if we buy into it too much, we lose hope completely and we can't act.
Sue:Right. Right. I love that idea of envisioning the future. And, actually, Wendy, who I'm going to be doing this restoring nature, restoring ourselves is in the middle of writing instead of a dystopian speculative fiction, a utopian speculative fiction and we kind of need that.
Deborah:We do, we absolutely do.
Sue:So anyway, yes, I'm right with you on that. I'm going to now reread Deborah's beautiful poem. Wild. Urban people that we are, we think the wild is something far as set apart in spirit as in place, a destination, coral reef, rainforest, mountain peak, both distant and diminished under threat. And yet, while we're asleep, night creatures prowl the landscape we call our own.
Sue:The brave coyote, fox and owl come out to hunt the city canyons and the silent parks, the dewy darkness of our still backyards. While divided from us just by skin, intergumin so brief and thin is all the wilderness within the seethe of blood and of and bone, of synapse sinew still unknown, untamed, its every rhythm owning us, kin to all the beings of the wild.
Deborah:Our prompt for today. Our word wild comes from the Old English wilde which in turn or wild, I suppose it's pronounced which in turn derives from Dutch and German Wilde, with possible roots in Proto Indo European Welt, which means woodland. It often means untamed, uncultivated, without human influence or control, and can be seen as pejorative, as we were discussing in regard to the English landscape, and can carry connotations of being self willed, or in old Icelandic of going astray even. So what does the word wild conjure for you as applied to the natural world? When you think of it as an adjective, what do
Sue:you think of? How about a verb? You might want to try what I did, was to write in pentameter five stresses per line, but sometimes place rhymes every four beats. Send your poem to us at curiositycatpodcastgmail dot com, and we promise to respond and maybe include your work in the show. Well what a ride this first season.
Sue:Thank you for coming along with us. We hope you feel inspired to write, to come to our open mics or other open mics. We hope that the Restoring Nature Forum and just to feel a little more centered in your life. As I mentioned in the introduction, we are going to take a pause to build up a bunch of new episodes so we are not up against the wire every week and to reflect and perhaps rejig our format a bit. If you have some ideas, please write to us at curiositycatpodcasts@gmail.com.
Sue:As ever, we'd love to hear from you. See our show notes for more details from these two restoring nature episodes and for the written versions of our poems. Don't forget to share, subscribe, and tell your friends about our podcast. We will be back on air at the April. Thank you so much for listening.
Sue:The music is composed by John Partridge and played by him on the piano and Deborah on flute. Production and editing by me, Sue Boudreaux, in El Sobrante, California.