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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. Deborah Backel Schmidt and me, Sue Boudreau here, your Follow A Fish poetry conversations and inspiration podcast hosts. Friends and neighbors for ages now enjoying the deep conversations of being poetry podcast pals. Every episode concludes with a prompt to inspire you to write and send something in. We hosted the first poetry open mic at the Good Table Space in El Sobrante, and it was really fun.
Sue:We thought over 20 people came and stayed, and we had lots of people reading poems, and at the end, there were specific positive comments about it, and had a really good time. We're going to be doing some more, and we're going to be inviting some local poet guests onto the show shortly. Our next poetry open mic is on Sunday, March 15. It's designed to be a very positive and encouraging experience. Others might be feeling something similar, and right there, a deeper connection better than glad we finally got some rain, although, of course, we are.
Sue:And that's the perfect segue in today's theme of wildfire. As last week, we are writing about an aspect of nature that is part of our ecosystem here in California. But with human intervention, it can be incredibly destructive to nature and to our lives and property. The intensity of blazes and destructiveness of wildfires has increased due to more people living near or in wild lands and the need to suppress fire near to them, of course. CO2 in the atmosphere actually increases the rate of plant growth, and then it increases the amount of fuel available.
Sue:Adding global warming and the random cycles of drought plus the usually human caused spark, including things like power lines sparking, a chain dragging along the road in Natinder dry grasslands, arson, a campfire left to smolder, and it's a recipe for the particular climate catastrophe that threatens our home in this beautiful state. The people in the epicenter of this are firefighters, and you can find out more about what it's like to be a firefighter in an episode of the What's It Like Jobs podcast on the Curiosity Cat podcast website. You can also find the poems on the page and accompanying artwork on the Follow A Fish page of the Curiosity Cat's podcast site. Reading a poem is a different experience to hearing them, so check them out. Deborah and I feel the wildfires and the threat deeply, and have written contrasting poems about different aspects of living with wildfire.
Sue:I'm going to start with Chimneys, written about the aftermath of the campfire that almost wiped out Paradise, California. My beloved mother-in-law lived there and just barely escaped. By the way, show notes linked to the episodes have links to information touched on in each episode, in this case, wildfire science, protecting yourself, and so on. Because poetry for me is at the intersection of art and science, nature as a reflection and allegory, helping me to understand what I'm feeling. And I hope for you too.
Sue:So I'm going to share a poem called Chimneys. Chimneys are what are left after a blaze tears through. It's all ashes and melted metal of something that used to be shelves, a walker, deck chair or toy trike, a city hall, a school or monument. The detritus of life settles lightly on the outlines of foundations. People slowly return to what they think was their home, sifting through ashes and ashes.
Sue:Perhaps something was skipped over, a wedding ring, a safe of important pay papers, a photograph of a child who left and never came back, a teapot I gave you painted with bats, and the flag outside what was once your house, oddly untouched, a mew of a miracle cat clawing down an unburned tree. Dragons stir and take to parched skies, unfurling their scaly skin wings, unseen by grandma settling into her morning TV with a bit of toast and a cup of tea, unaware she's in the crosshairs of catastrophe. Bark beetles eating, trees drying, undergrowth accumulating and warming, baking drying and dying, plus a spark. Dragons are afoot and a flight breathing, unseasonable fury. Dragons in the smoke sunset skies.
Sue:Dragons. Dragons in paradise.
Deborah:Oh my gosh. So what a powerful poem. Listeners may not have been able to tell by listening, but in this poem, the title, Chimneys, is the beginning of a sentence completed by the first line, are what's left after a blaze tears through. It's such an effective way to pull us right into this highly visual poem in which you move from haunting details of what remains after a fire ashes, melted metal, to wildfire embodied as dragons breathing unseasonable fury. Into the dragon images, you've woven a concise and powerful scientific description of the drying forest.
Deborah:I especially like the repetition or anaphora of the last section in which you repeat the word dragons, at first at the beginning of a whole stanza, then a sentence, dragons are afoot and a flight, breathing unseasonable fury, then a phrase, dragons in the smoke sunset skies, and then alone before ending with dragons in paradise. It's really powerful rhythm. Can you share with us your own experience of wildfire, especially in paradise?
Sue:I was not luckily actually there, but we were listening to it blow by blow. It was a day when smoke came, was funneled through the of Arinda, which is where I was teaching, a place where there was the worst air quality in the world on that day. And I was very aware that my mother-in-law and her husband had evacuated from paradise, grabbing, you know, he grabbed clothes and she grabbed insurance papers, thank goodness. And it was the last time he ever drove their minivan and they ended up having to go the back route out of paradise. And if people have seen the, I think it was called The Last Bus, which was a movie on, with Matthew McConaughey.
Sue:That story I was aware of before the movie came out, but they went along that similar route, I think a little bit before, so it wasn't quite as terrifyingly crazy, but it was still pretty crazy with drop offs. It took them something like, you know, and hours to get to Chico, which is where there were people were being mustered. And apparently it was in the middle of the day, it was absolutely black from the smoke. So they just barely escaped and Rita had to go and buy toothbrush and toothpaste at Target and all of the chaos. It was really intense and I was incredibly fond of my mother-in-law.
Sue:It was just awful thinking that the smoke I was breathing was parts of their house, which we just moved them to. Oh. It was like all of that expense and thinking about it and the effort and the whole thing was so intense that when her son, my son's dad went to help them figure out how to go forward, they found literally almost nothing at their house site. The appliances had melted into the ground. But there were these odd things that were skipped over.
Sue:So there was this teapot that I had made for my mother-in-law and I'd actually made an entire tea set where I had the glaze that I was expecting to turn up like a beautiful dawn, but instead it was much more orange and there's a picture actually on the, in the show notes of this teapot and it looks like bats flying out of hell. But that survived. And, so did the flag. And apparently when I showed my friend who's a fire ecologist the picture, she said, oh, it's not a miracle, it's defensible space. And I was like, oh, wow.
Sue:And that was like a real change of a moment. So I am actually gonna cut down trees around my Because that's why the flag survived.
Deborah:True, positive.
Sue:Plus also, you know, a miracle. Yeah. Yeah. There's the miracle. I love your
Deborah:image of the cat coming down the tree. Yeah. Oh. And how does this dragon symbol come to you in the poem?
Sue:I've just always been kind of weirdly obsessed with dragons as a of the mixture of sinister and trickstery and watching us. And I made this sculpture when I went to a metalwork class, then I made a cave to fit in the fireplace, and I got broken glass from an auto shop, windshields, and I made a clay dragon to put in there. It was really fun. It fit only in that one fireplace, but I remember when I was dating when I was in my twenties, a boyfriend came over, took a look at it, and he's like, no, and left. I don't know, yeah.
Sue:They're very important in mythology.
Deborah:Yeah, definitely. Well, it's a very effective symbol in the poem. It really, really works. It's interesting that you chose to name the poem Chimneys. Ironically, the chimney is often all that's left of a house destroyed by fire, which is the very thing that the chimney is built to nurture by drawing air, contain and channel.
Deborah:There's a house on the way up to our cabin. Well, there's no longer a house, but there's a beautiful chimney standing by the side of Route 49, and I often think about what happened there. All the dreams that burned down. The chimneys that stand after a fire seem to mock our human efforts to control this element. Yeah.
Deborah:You never return directly to the chimney image, but you leave us with this visceral contrast contrast between between domesticated fire and the dragons of wildfire. I'd love to hear your thoughts about your choice of a title for this poem. And how do we name poems that cover so much ground?
Sue:I have no idea. I really don't know. I mean, it just, I think, like you, I was just really struck by the news images of that was the only thing that was left. But when you asked me the question, and I, we exchanged questions ahead of time and I was thinking about it, and this idea of domesticated versus wildfire versus destructive inferno's, because wildfire is something that is a natural part of this ecosystem and indigenous people living here and elsewhere in the world know this, and they do controlled burns. But when you have fire suppression, which happened up to the 1960s, I don't know if you, I'm sure you remember the Smokey the Bear I'm
Deborah:a Smokey the Bear survivor.
Sue:I had I mean, I had lunchbox with Smokey the Bear and my third Smokey the Bear Fairness. Smokey the Bear. And that. It was a very yeah. It was a very powerful ad campaign.
Sue:It's one of the most powerful ever, believe, the most well known. It hasn't
Deborah:stopped actually. You still
Sue:see Well, signs up in the there are, but it's nuanced now because as fire suppression has been changed and now there are lots of controlled burns, are to try and reduce the amount of fuel. Know, basically when you have human habitation going into wild lands, it becomes kind of a choice when you're talking about home hardening. It's like, do I really want to cut down all of the wild vegetation around my house? Yeah. And at what price, right?
Sue:So, yeah, it's another example of where people have tried to control a force of nature in some ways that is that comes back to bite us so hard, and the same is true with flooding. Yeah. And working with nature, not against nature. That's going to be our hope for the future.
Deborah:Absolutely. Yes, we have so much to learn from the indigenous communities.
Sue:Yes. And that conservation science is finally getting on board with that.
Deborah:It's slow, but it's happening. Right. It is happening. Yeah. Chimneys are what's left after a blaze tears through.
Deborah:It's all ashes and melted metal of something that used to be shelves, a walker, deck chair, or toy trike, A city hall, a school, or monument. The detritus of lives settles lightly on the outline of foundations. People slowly return to what they think was their home, sifting through ashes and ashes. Perhaps something was skipped over. A wedding ring, a safe of important papers, a photograph of a child who left and never came back, a teapot I gave you painted with bats and the flag outside what was once your house, oddly untouched, a mew of a miracle miracle cat clawing down an unburned tree.
Deborah:Dragons stir and take to parched skies, unfurling their scaly skin wings, unseen by grandma settling into her morning TV with a bit of toast and cup of tea, unaware she's in the crosshairs of catastrophe. Bark beetles eating, trees drying, undergrowth accumulating and warming, baking, drying and dying, plus a spark. Dragons are afoot and a flight, breathing unseasonable fury. Dragons in the smoke, sunset skies. Dragons.
Deborah:Dragons in paradise.
Sue:The prompt for today is simple: wildfire. What sticks in your mind about the last fire season? Take a tiny detail and build it out as you write. Let your mind whirl. Maybe take a silent walk around the block to let things simmer, then write.
Sue:Separate the editing for a day or two. It's a different side of your brain, and letting in the edit critic too soon is death to the imagination. Send in your work to curiositycatpodcasts@gmail.com, and you too could have your work read out to our massive, growing global audience, poetic license here, which you can help us grow by sharing, subscribing, and badgering your friends to listen. The music is composed by John Partridge and played by him and Deborah on the flute, production and editing by me, Subudro, in El Sobrante, California.
Deborah:Our music is composed by John Partridge and performed by him on piano and me on flute. Production and editing is all done by Sue Boudreaux right here in El Sobrante, California. Thanks for listening.