April 25, 2024 • 35 mins
Many anthologies of nature poetry and Black poetry have excluded Black nature poetry. But Black people have always written poetry about nature. We write about the land that supports us and challenges us. We write about the animals we care for and the disasters that destroy our homes. We write about the rivers we cross and the soil we till.
Black nature poems reflect the enormous range of experiences that we have in our physical environments. As they show us, nature can haunt, and nature can heal. In today’s episode, Katie and Yves discuss the work of a few writers who train their words on the natural world.
Get show notes at ontheme.show
Follow us on Instagram @onthemeshow
Email us at hello@ontheme.show
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all, Eve's here. I know you're ready to get
into this episode, but really quick. We have been loving
connecting with y'all over black storytelling, and if you've really
been loving the show, then we would really appreciate it
if you would leave us a rating and review, subscribe
to the show, and share it with your friends. Thanks y'all.
Now time for the episode. On theme is a production
(00:21):
of iHeartRadio and fair Weather Friends Media. You are.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Katie here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Spring has sprung and I love this time of year
because of all the reminders of life. The days are longer,
the festivals are popping, the grills are firing up.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Basically, we back outside.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And I love it. And you know what, it feels
like a good time for an ode to black nature poetry.
I'm Katie and I'm Eves. Today's episode living Breathing Poetry.
In the United States, black people's relationship with nature is
fraught with stories of human danger. Nature has often been
(01:20):
a site of violence, dispossession, and exploitation. Think about lynching
and its association with trees. About the horrendous trips that
so many kidnapped Black Africans had to take across the
ocean in the Transatlantic slave trade, and think about Jim
Crow laws that prohibited black people from enjoying public beaches
or limited them to dirty, remote beaches. We could go
(01:42):
through a million more ways that people intentionally made nature
inhospitable and hostile for black people. Of course, nature has
also often been a site of refuge and a source
for survival, but so many Black Americans experiences in nature
have been rooted in exclusion and othering, so that relationship
has been tainted. We've been forced to interact with the
(02:04):
land as laborers and refugees, but we've also been torn
apart from the leisure and beauty of nature in so
many ways.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
We are haunted and we're healing. A lot of people
around the world are organizing black outdoor groups and reclaiming
their right to be present and feel happy outside.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Definitely, and I am one of those people who loves
to frolic outdoors. But I do still have a lot
of conflicting feelings about nature, and a lot of them
are expressed so beautifully in nature poetry by black writers.
They write about the awe, the trauma, the inspiration, the love,
the fear. Black poets have written a lot about their
(02:45):
relationships with their physical environments. Those hard to parse emotions
that I have when I'm hiking or camping can be
summed up in a page or two in a poem,
and Black Nature poetry helps me process those feelings, even
if the contentment I find only last for a moment.
As many Black scholars have pointed out, black writers are
(03:05):
often left out of collections of American nature poetry, and
nature poems are often left out of collections of Black
American poetry. The book Black Nature, Four Centuries of African
American Nature Poetry, edited by Kamil T. Dungee, was the
first anthology to center nature poetry by Black American writers,
and it was published in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
It's pretty telling that it covers four centuries of work.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah, because obviously, just like writers of other races, Black
people have a ton to say about the world around us.
We have thoughts about the land that supports us and
challenges us. We speak about the animals we care for
and the disasters that destroy our homes. Black folks poems
reflect the range of experiences that we have in our
physical environments.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
When I think of nature poetry, I think of poems
that exalt nature and emphasize its divinity and benevolence. It's
usually positive, full of awe and wonder. But is that
what you're talking about?
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That's part of it, but that's not all of it.
As scholar ev Shockley explained in her essay Black Nature,
Human Nature, there was a lingering perception that Black American
poets did not write about nature, and that was propped
up by black poetry's association with urban environments throughout part
of the twentieth century. But poems that explore the darker
(04:26):
side of nature, not just its glory and magnificence, can
also be considered nature poems.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
So basically anything dealing with the outside.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
And this is one of those things that I go
back and forth on because nature really can have like
so many definitions, and I think different scholars and at
different times have considered nature different things. And whether they're
considering it from like a more environmental perspective or they're
considering it from an ecological perspective, then nature can mean
different things. It can mean human's relationship with nature, It
(04:59):
can just mean things that are outside of the human
body and the human scope, which humans' hands have created.
But then there are other people who take nature to
also include the human because we exist on this earth,
and that would include the human form and things that
we do in the built environment in nature. So I
(05:20):
generally like to think of nature as things, and I
think for this episode as well, things outside that are
things that are not human created.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Because even like here in Atlanta, there's Piedmont Park which
is full of a lot of you know, trees and
animals and water and you know fish and all that,
but it was designed by a man.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, I think the concept of a park is human.
But the grass is still nature, the fish is still nature.
All of those things were not created by humans.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
So so you're talking about the park, it's not nature poetry.
But if you're talking about the grass in the park,
it is nature poetry. No.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, I think if you're talking about the park, it
still is nature poetry because the park includes nature. But
if you're talking about like a skyscraper, then is not nature.
I think the lines do get pretty fuzzy because you
can talk about stepping outside your door and you live
in an urban environment and there's a green space that
uses turf instead of real grass. But I think you
can still talk about nature because there might be trees there,
(06:22):
still there might be birds that are living there. And
also like there are pigeons, those are still part of
nature too. So if I write a poem about interacting
with the pigeons and I'm sitting on a bench on
a street corner in the middle of a very busy
street in a city, You're still talking about nature. So
I think even in this book Black Nature by Kameilite Dungeee,
she really takes an expanded view of what nature is
(06:43):
and that often includes the urban environment. So from my
experience and reading all the different scholars takes on what
nature poetry is, there is a lot of leeway, Like
there's a lot of wiggle room. But the way that
I'm thinking about it today and for the purposes of
our conversation today, I'm thinking about nature as things that
are not part of the human made, human built environment.
(07:08):
In the book Black on Earth, author Kimberly N. Ruffin
talks about what she calls the ecological burden and beauty paradox,
which quote pinpoints the dynamic influence of the natural and
social order on African American experience and outlook. She goes
on to say quote, and the combination of the burden
and beauty resides a story the world should hear. So
(07:30):
put on your sunscreen, grab your hats, get your allergy
medicine if you needed, because today on the show, we're
going to spend a little time outdoors. Part one, Fear
(07:52):
may live here. It's hard to ignore the relationship between
nature and horror. In the Black American imagination and in
black creative expression. There are the dangers that we all
face in the natural world, for example, territorial creatures, unpredictable weather,
and toxic plants. And then there's the terror we feel
(08:13):
when we remember that in this world, our interactions with
the natural world have often been hostile and ugly. Even
when everything looks beautiful, even when everything seems peaceful, that
encoded fear reminds us that it's not. There's a reason
Dungee opens her book Black Nature with an untitled poem
by Lucille Clifton. In it, Clifton questions why she can't
(08:36):
write a poem about nature and landscape without there being
some sinister subtext beneath it. So I think it's appropriate
to start with the nature poetry of a man who
was enslaved George Moses Horton. He was born in North
(08:59):
Carolina in seventeen ninety eight, and when he was a child,
he taught himself to read and began composing poems in
his head. He sold love poems to students at the
University of North Carolina, and he used the money he
made from selling them and working as a laborer at
the university to purchase time from his enslavers. But he
also composed his own poems, which were about slavery and
(09:21):
rural life in the South.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Here's part of.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
One of his poems, called The Southern Refugee. The verdant
willow droops her head and seems to bid a fare
thee will the flowers with tears, their fragrance shed alas
their parting tale. To tale tis like the loss of paradise,
or Eden's garden left in gloom, where grief affords us
no device, Such is thy lot my native home. I
(09:47):
never never shall forget my sad departure far away, until
the sun of life is set and leaves behind no
beam of day. How can I, from my seat remove
and leave my ever devoted home and the dear garden
which I love the beauty of my native home. In
eighteen twenty nine, Horton became the first Black American man
(10:08):
to publish a book in the South, and he wrote
the first known poem by an enslaved person that protested slavery,
a poem called Liberty and Slavery. Horton also published books,
and he saved money from the books he published with
the intention of buying his freedom, but his enslavery didn't
go for that, so he remained enslaved until the end
of the Civil War, when he went to Philadelphia, then Liberia,
(10:30):
and eventually back to Philadelphia. In the poem The Southern Refugee,
Horton laments leaving the South, the place where he was enslaved.
The horror of chattel slavery enforced displacement set the stage
for this story, but it's also the story of a
broken heart. His images of gardens, willows, flowers, and paradise
paint a picture of a welcoming, idyllic environment, But nature
(10:53):
mourns for him. It mourns his departure, and he grieves
losing the land. He knows and loves us such a
connection with the land that it speaks to him as
he leaves, and as a refugee, Horton is fleeing a
familiar environment and entering into unknown territory. So there's this
connection and disconnection with land and environment that is a
(11:14):
through line from slavery to all of its offshoots.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Well, I think his work is more of the camp
that humans are a part of nature, and just thinking
about his position in the world. I think he was
definitely closer to the land than a lot of us are.
The way we live. Even being born in North Carolina
in the late seventeen hundreds, the expectation is that you
(11:39):
work the land. But then I imagined that there were
people he was in community with on those plantations that
did remember Africa or had stories from it, and you know,
in a space that isn't like trying to be like
so industrialized and isn't trying to like extract so much
from the land, but you're just like working in community
(12:01):
with it. So I think his poetry like speaks to
that relationship.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yeah, and that might be Well, I don't know if
it's why he expressed such a love for the land,
but I do still think in reading his work it
kind of I don't know if surprised me, but it
definitely had an emotional effect on me. Of how emotional
he felt about it. He really didn't want to leave
this space where he probably saw so many other people
(12:27):
face terrible things, and he too himself also probably had
a lot of difficult times. I do know that in
the story of his life he sold his poems, he
did he was like a handy man at the university,
but all the while he was trying to buy his freedom,
which is very intense and to be told no. So
(12:47):
I am still very taken aback by the expression of
the love that he had for the land without overtly
mentioning the horror at the same time, because as we
mentioned early, there was that burden and beauty paradox. So
a lot of the time we'll see black authors talking
about their struggle between feeling so in alignment and connection
(13:12):
with the land and at the same time feeling alienated
by it. So in this poem, we don't see as
much of that alienation from the land. We just see
his connection to it. And so I don't know if
that's a compartmentalization or if it's just an honest expression
of how he felt, and it's just my projection and
my viewpoint from this point in time of thinking he
(13:33):
has to always talk about the terrors, because you know,
they don't. They lived their lives, They loved a lot
of things in their lives. The earth was still beautiful.
Why shouldn't they enjoy that and be able to talk
about it in that way without always reverting to their trauma.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I do think it's interesting because I feel like black
people are obsessed with like black first. Yeah, and he
said he was like the first known person to like
write poems denouncing slavery, which I think that's just like
a very interesting first to be why, just because you
would think if there were poets like that would be
like the first thing that you would write about, I think.
(14:09):
But of course it's very dangerous to be writing while
you're enslaved. A lot of people couldn't write in English,
and you know their mother tongue was taken from them,
so probably not like the highest priority to be writing poems.
But it is interesting to have that like first documented.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
To me, it is interesting, and I think that there
may have been other people who had oral poems who
didn't write them down right.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Yeah, even the spirituals their songs, and you know, songs
and poems are like very.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Like it's still verse.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yeah, so they were condemning slavery and like telling people
how to get the fuck own in a very covert way.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
But like you.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
Said, they might not have been written down and they
might have been like who actually wrote these or like
are they just like a community song?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Right?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
We all made together?
Speaker 1 (14:56):
And Horton he at first he spoke his poems as well,
and he remembered them in his head and he spoke
them and he had somebody else transcribe them who was
able to write, because he wasn't able to write. But
he was doing this as a child. He started doing
this when he was young, and it wasn't until much
later after that eighteen twenty nine publication, I believe when
he learned to write himself. So it's you know, illiteracy
(15:19):
also plays a factor, and unable to write also plays
a factor in this first for him. But as we
know first, there's always some context around first. Yeah. So
the other thing that struck me about this poem is
his use of the word native, because I feel like
that word native can have so many layers to it.
In the end of the part that we read from
this poem, he says the beauty of my native home,
(15:43):
So he uses that word native, and I think that
can be a heavy word because I mean, people were
kidnapped from Africa and had to come overseas to get here.
And he still considered not just this soil, but the
southern United States his native home because he could have
(16:03):
just at home, but he chose to add the qualified
native on top of it. So that shows just how
strongly he felt that is the place where he belonged,
is the place he loved, and how much of a
connection he had with that land.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to just
like Black Americans being like very nomadic people and being
like forced nomads, right, like we were taken from Africa.
But then you know, like we're here, we're born here,
we have family here, we make culture here, and so
at some point, for better or for worse, this is
(16:38):
like our home. And he even left and went to
Liberia and then came back to the United States. So
I feel a question people still have today like can
we go back or is this where we're supposed to
be at this point?
Speaker 1 (16:52):
And there's the act of claiming that's happening in this
poem as well, which is also another thing that comes
up a lot.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
So he went back to.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Liberia for a minute, there is evidence of that happening,
and then he came back, so there was something pulling
him back. I'm not sure if anybody knows what happened there. Yea,
they have records of him getting on the ship and
going over there, and they have records of him coming back.
But the reason is why we don't have We don't
have diaries from this man that I know of that
tell us that. So that's unknown. Part two. But we
(17:44):
must work. So we've talked about this tug of war
happening in the consciousness.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Of black people. We've talked about how.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
We see nature's beauty and duty only to itself, while
also realizing that we have been divorced from our connection
to it. The fear, alienation, and pain that we feel
and relation to nature sometimes shows up in nature poetry
in scenes where rich and wonderful landscapes are interrupted by
illustrations of or allusions to violence. But another thing that
(18:12):
black nature poetry helps me think about is labor in nature,
the kind that we must do because our survival depends
on it, or that we choose to do because it
fulfills us. Because I'm a twenty first century girl in
the US of A, I have relative privilege. I don't
have to toil the same way my ancestors did, just
to put food on their plates. And I have enough
(18:34):
money to pay for the labor I might otherwise do
if I had an economic status that didn't afford me
those luxuries. So as I enjoy nature, and as I
realize how much I don't know about it, I think
about how much environmental knowledge and practical experience my forebears
had to have.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
We have sown, we have reared, and we have grown.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
In some nature poems, we get to see black people
loving the earth, using tender hands to touch soil and
water gardens, and using calloused hands to dig dirt and
harvest vegetables. It is difficult, but it's our duty. I
can think about how. In the Palm Sorrow Home by
author Margaret Walker, the speaker longs for southern land. She
(19:18):
says this, I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane.
I want to walk along with sacks of seed to
drop and fallow ground. And I can think about Anne Spencer,
a poet, activist, and gardener, and everything she said about feeling, seeing,
smelling and touching and speaking of Anne, there's the poem
to a Certain Lady in her Garden by Sterling A Brown,
(19:40):
which was for Anne Spencer. Here are a couple of
stanzas from that poem. Surely I think I shall remember this,
you and your old rough dress, bedaubed with clay, your
smudgy face, parading happiness, life's puzzles solved. Perhaps in turn,
you may, one time, while clipping bush tending vines, making
(20:02):
your brave sly mock at dastard days, laughed gently at
these trivial, truthful lines, and that will be sufficient for
my praise.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
He really saw her. Yeah, to be seen in that
way lovely.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, I really enjoyed that. It felt so celebratory. I
was like, I want somebody to write a poem for me,
and a good one. I love the joy that I
feel like he felt in writing it, and the joy
that he saw in her, and not just in her gardening,
but also like in the messiness around her gardening. So
(20:38):
he appreciated all the flaws that came up in the
act of her like tending to the land. And I
think that also feels like an image that I seen
so many black women do, is like them working in
their gardens and kneeling down in their gardens and getting
their hands dirty or maybe wearing gloves. You know, it
can be nostalgic, but also very typical pastoral image that
(21:01):
is typical of a lot of other nature imagery in
nature poetry of people gardening and these blooms and flowers
and greenery.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
It's very verdant. So I really liked that about this.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
It felt very simple and wholesome, and it also felt
like kind of a meta narrative because we're sitting there
imagining and in her garden. But she often also wrote
about her garden herself in her poems that.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
She did because she's also a poet, so.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
It's like her in her element, is her in this
very free space. And there's another part of the poem
where Starling A. Brown does this juxtaposition between the street
that's right there by the home and the garden itself.
So he calls the streets things like dingy, and he
says the noise is futile or something like that, and
(21:52):
he says they're silly. So he's attaching these negative characterizations
to the human built environment that is literally right there
next to this act of creation, and it's taking in
her garden, And in my mind, I'm forming these images
of gray drab street right up against the greens and
(22:15):
all of the other colors of her garden, and it
makes it seem like it's this haven for her.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Lots of fun imagery.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Yes, lots of it. Part three Then rest a while,
(22:48):
so Kabi.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
As we've made clear, black people have a complicated relationship
with nature, but black poets did write about their relationship
with nature outside of its wrong as a setting for
trauma and subjugation. Through Black nature poetry, we get to
see how black people enjoy their environments. We get the romance, pleasure,
(23:11):
and pastoral softness that black poets were deemed incapable of.
For many years, people believed black folks were, as poet
Evi Shockley put it, uncomfortable in nature. Now, I don't
think nature poems by Black Americans can be completely divorced
from their social and historical context. And that's where I
(23:31):
think what you talked about earlier coming in Katie, how
there was that human element in George Horton's work how
it came into his even though his imagery.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Was all about nature.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
It would be hard for a black nature poem to
be all leisurely and sublime or all tragic. But there
is a middle ground where we lay in the bliss
and splendor and stay awhile take Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson.
She lived to be eighty eight, but she only published
poet Tree from the nineteen twenties to the mid nineteen thirties.
(24:03):
Poets James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost praised her writing.
In nineteen thirty three, her last published poem, Let Me
Sing My Song, appeared in the journal Challenge. After this point,
she continued to write privately, but she stopped publishing poetry
by nineteen thirty five. Family life consumed her attention. Still,
(24:24):
more than half of her poems included nature themes. Here's
part of one poem titled Fulfillment. In it, she uses
examples from the natural world to express the simple joy
she finds in everyday life. To lean against a strong
tree's bosom, sentient and hushed before the silent prayer it
breathes to melt the still snow with my seething body,
(24:46):
and kiss the warm earth tremulous underneath, and even in death.
Johnson planned to hold nature in high regard. Her association
of nature with humility, beauty, and freedom is evident in
her poem and vacation. Let me be buried in the rain,
in a deep, dripping wood, under the warm, wet breast
(25:09):
of earth, where once a gnarled tree stood, And paint
a picture on my tomb with dirt and a piece
of bow, of a girl and a boy beneath a
round right moon, eating of love with an eager spoon,
and vowing an eager vow. And do not keep my
plot mode smooth and clean as a spinster's bed. But
let the weed, the flower, the tree, riotous, rampant, wild
(25:33):
and free grow high above my head.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
I think this is my favorite poem. Oh why I
think it shows that kind of what I'm saying, Like
we are nature, and she put herself in it and
trying to like not make it bend to her. Because
when you think of cemeteries, they're really manicured. A lot
of them be called like Memorial garden, but it'll be
(25:59):
full of like fake flowers by the graves. But she
was just kind of saying, let me just be here
and let nature do what it do, and I'm gonna
do what I do, and we're just gonna be in
harmony because we are like one thing. That's what I
got from it.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
M hm. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Beneath is that feeling of returning. Yes, it's like this
is where I came from, this is what I'm going
back to. And it has environmentalist tones too, like it's
it feels like a green burial, like it's not much interference,
not much interjection of human made materials that she mentions
in here. She does mention wood interesting because you kind
(26:38):
of associate with with caskets, so I feel like it
calls that up. But that wood is about the forest itself.
She's talking about that and the use of that word.
So she talks about using dirt and a piece of
bow rather than engraving and engraving in a tombstone. So
she purposefully seems like intentionally uses more natural words rather
(26:59):
than some other things. Yeah, so I'm imagining a very
wild place rather than a manicured place when I think
of this poem, and I think I really like this
one too. I think it is also my favorite of
the ones that we talked about today. And it feels like,
even though she only published work for such a short
period of time, like over the course of a decade,
she packed so much into it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
And she also got published a lot in a very
short time. I'm like, girl, you go, but it's what
I get. Yeah, this is what we get. So yeah,
I really like that.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
And one thing I think in general about Black nature
poetry and why I like it so much, is because
for me, it kind of replicates the feelings that I
have when I'm in nature, even when I'm not in
nature when I'm reading them, So I am so frequently
overwhelmed and overcome by all the feelings that I have
that aw the fear, the wonder. I am wondering what
(27:53):
my place is in this soil, you know, I have
all this history. If I'm in the South, in like
a rural place, you know, I might be What's gonna
happen to me? If I'm sleeping in a tent at night,
I might be thinking about the animals that are around me,
the creatures that are around me, or if there are
other people involved, there might be actual questions that I
have come from other people, like I've asked people to
(28:15):
camp with me and they're like, I'm kind of scared, Like,
what's gonna happen. There're gonna be a bunch of white
people there. And I've had to have that conversation with people.
It's like we're also in danger in the city, you know,
like I get it, this is something that you haven't
done before, but like, let's talk about this fear and
why it's coming up. So all of those feelings that
I have are multitudinous that I could go on about
(28:36):
forever and ever. My knowledge that I have of the
land and how I have still so much to learn
to learn. Every time I go out and do something
like hiking camp or go on a nature walk where
some scholars talking and I'm learning this thing about what
my ancestors did to be able to find their ways.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
It's like so much that I'm.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Thinking about and that I'm holding even if I'm not
thinking about it, I'm just carrying it in my body.
And I think poems about nature, poetry by black people
help me tap into that without having to overthink it.
I don't need a think piece for it. I don't
need a four hundred page book of nonfiction essays for poems,
I can just sit with them and I can get
(29:16):
more of an understanding that other people before me were
thinking about it. The ways that they work through them
was by writing, and that's helping me today. And some
things were different, some things were the same. But I
just really appreciate how I can let go of so
much of the act of thinking when I'm reading poetry
(29:40):
about nature and tune into the act of feeling. That
feels very productive and trying to parse those feelings about nature.
So in honor of rest, renewal, and regeneration, I'll leave
everyone with the end of a poem by the first
writer we talked about today, George Horton. This one's called
(30:01):
on Spring inspiring months of youthful love. How oft we,
in a peaceful grow survey the flowery plume, or sit
beneath the sylvan shade where branches wave above the head,
and smile on every bloom exalted months when thou art gone,
may virtue then begin the dawn of an eternal spring.
(30:22):
May raptures kindle on my tongue and start a new
eternal song which ne'er shall cease to ring.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
And now it's time for roll credits, the segment where
we give credit to a person, place, or thing that
we encountered during the week eves. Who are what would
you like to give credit to today?
Speaker 1 (30:55):
I will stick with the black nature theme and I
like to give credit to the book A Darker Wilderness
Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars edited by Aaron Sharky.
That is not a book of poetry, that is a
book of essays. But if you're interested in this kind
of thing of reading more about black nature and being
steeped in that world, then I would recommend to read cool.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I would like to give credit to honey mangoes. They
are in season and I just live for that, because
you know, the peach plant, the peach crop last year terrible,
But them honey mangoes, they gonna do it. And they're
only in season for a little bit in Georgia at least,
(31:40):
and I want to get a shout out at him
because they delicious.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Was it just the Georgia peach crop last year?
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Or I think because you know Georgia does it and
it South Carolina. I think South Carolina do it more
than Georgia, even though we do peach date I'd be
seeing California peaches in the Georgia grocery store and they
just was not it year. But I think it was
something with, you know, the environment, Like I don't know
if they there's like a cold shock or something happened
where a good, good, good amount of it was just
(32:10):
destroyed and the ones that weren't were that good.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, all my family members they swear by South Carolina
peaches over Georgia peaches. Like everybody knows that South Carolina
peaches are better than Georgia was.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
I can see that.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
You know, I'm not gonna I'm not even gonna fight
nobody on that. Okay, you got a better peach. Okay,
you're the real peaches.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Go off. Rather be a peach than a pow meadow?
Is that they're the power meadow state? Yeah? What is that?
It's a tree?
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Oh not even I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
I'm trying to cause beef between different species of plants.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And I'm really not shout out to palmeatos and peaches.
Can you eat a pal meadow? No you can't. That's
actually fair.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
So hey, one provides sustenance, the other provided oxygen.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
I guess true. But the p street also provides oxygen.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, well, Katie's clearly on the side. So everyone who
wants to stand up from pal Meadows, please let us know.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
In the spirit of spring and rest, we are going
on our own spring break to get back to nature
to be creative, and we will be back June sixth
with all new episodes. What are some of the things
you're excited to explore during our spring break, Eves.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I am looking forward to get out into nature for real,
Like I think, I want to do a little bit
more camping, and it's the time of year that's perfect
to do that. I mean, all times of year can
be perfect in different places for whatever your speed is.
But yeah, I want to do some more camping. I
haven't done enough this year.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
I'm excited to be in them books, reading, and you
can look forward to episodes hearing from different archivists and
the funny, funny stories that they've found while in the archives.
We'll also be talking to a children's literature expert about
(34:16):
the lessons kids that passes down from us to our
little ones.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
And you can also look forward to episodes about black
muses and the history of visual arts, and also crunk
music and snap music. As you know we hear are
Atlanta supremacists. So while we're on this break, you can
go back and listen to episodes of on Theme that
you haven't listened to before, or you can re listen
(34:43):
to episodes that you haven't heard already, or you can
just let people know about the show and y'all stay
subscribed because all of our lovely episodes are coming in June,
so make sure you're following us on social media. To
keep up with us, we are at on them Show
on Instagram. You could also keep up with us on
(35:04):
our website. Go and read show notes at on Theme
dot Show.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
See y'all after the break. Bye.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media.
This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell.
It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us
on Instagram at on Themeshow. You can also send us
an email at hello at on Theme dot Show. Head
to on Theme dot Show to check out the show
(35:38):
notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hey, y'all, Eve's here. I know you're ready to get
into this episode, but really quick. We have been loving
connecting with y'all over black storytelling, and if you've really
been loving the show, then we would really appreciate it
if you would leave us a rating and review, subscribe
to the show, and share it with your friends. Thanks y'all.
Now time for the episode. On theme is a production
(00:21):
of iHeartRadio and fair Weather Friends Media. You are.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Katie here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Spring has sprung and I love this time of year
because of all the reminders of life. The days are longer,
the festivals are popping, the grills are firing up.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Basically, we back outside.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And I love it. And you know what, it feels
like a good time for an ode to black nature poetry.
I'm Katie and I'm Eves. Today's episode living Breathing Poetry.
In the United States, black people's relationship with nature is
fraught with stories of human danger. Nature has often been
(01:20):
a site of violence, dispossession, and exploitation. Think about lynching
and its association with trees. About the horrendous trips that
so many kidnapped Black Africans had to take across the
ocean in the Transatlantic slave trade, and think about Jim
Crow laws that prohibited black people from enjoying public beaches
or limited them to dirty, remote beaches. We could go
(01:42):
through a million more ways that people intentionally made nature
inhospitable and hostile for black people. Of course, nature has
also often been a site of refuge and a source
for survival, but so many Black Americans experiences in nature
have been rooted in exclusion and othering, so that relationship
has been tainted. We've been forced to interact with the
(02:04):
land as laborers and refugees, but we've also been torn
apart from the leisure and beauty of nature in so
many ways.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
We are haunted and we're healing. A lot of people
around the world are organizing black outdoor groups and reclaiming
their right to be present and feel happy outside.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Definitely, and I am one of those people who loves
to frolic outdoors. But I do still have a lot
of conflicting feelings about nature, and a lot of them
are expressed so beautifully in nature poetry by black writers.
They write about the awe, the trauma, the inspiration, the love,
the fear. Black poets have written a lot about their
(02:45):
relationships with their physical environments. Those hard to parse emotions
that I have when I'm hiking or camping can be
summed up in a page or two in a poem,
and Black Nature poetry helps me process those feelings, even
if the contentment I find only last for a moment.
As many Black scholars have pointed out, black writers are
(03:05):
often left out of collections of American nature poetry, and
nature poems are often left out of collections of Black
American poetry. The book Black Nature, Four Centuries of African
American Nature Poetry, edited by Kamil T. Dungee, was the
first anthology to center nature poetry by Black American writers,
and it was published in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
It's pretty telling that it covers four centuries of work.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah, because obviously, just like writers of other races, Black
people have a ton to say about the world around us.
We have thoughts about the land that supports us and
challenges us. We speak about the animals we care for
and the disasters that destroy our homes. Black folks poems
reflect the range of experiences that we have in our
physical environments.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
When I think of nature poetry, I think of poems
that exalt nature and emphasize its divinity and benevolence. It's
usually positive, full of awe and wonder. But is that
what you're talking about?
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That's part of it, but that's not all of it.
As scholar ev Shockley explained in her essay Black Nature,
Human Nature, there was a lingering perception that Black American
poets did not write about nature, and that was propped
up by black poetry's association with urban environments throughout part
of the twentieth century. But poems that explore the darker
(04:26):
side of nature, not just its glory and magnificence, can
also be considered nature poems.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
So basically anything dealing with the outside.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
And this is one of those things that I go
back and forth on because nature really can have like
so many definitions, and I think different scholars and at
different times have considered nature different things. And whether they're
considering it from like a more environmental perspective or they're
considering it from an ecological perspective, then nature can mean
different things. It can mean human's relationship with nature, It
(04:59):
can just mean things that are outside of the human
body and the human scope, which humans' hands have created.
But then there are other people who take nature to
also include the human because we exist on this earth,
and that would include the human form and things that
we do in the built environment in nature. So I
(05:20):
generally like to think of nature as things, and I
think for this episode as well, things outside that are
things that are not human created.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Because even like here in Atlanta, there's Piedmont Park which
is full of a lot of you know, trees and
animals and water and you know fish and all that,
but it was designed by a man.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, I think the concept of a park is human.
But the grass is still nature, the fish is still nature.
All of those things were not created by humans.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
So so you're talking about the park, it's not nature poetry.
But if you're talking about the grass in the park,
it is nature poetry. No.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Well, I think if you're talking about the park, it
still is nature poetry because the park includes nature. But
if you're talking about like a skyscraper, then is not nature.
I think the lines do get pretty fuzzy because you
can talk about stepping outside your door and you live
in an urban environment and there's a green space that
uses turf instead of real grass. But I think you
can still talk about nature because there might be trees there,
(06:22):
still there might be birds that are living there. And
also like there are pigeons, those are still part of
nature too. So if I write a poem about interacting
with the pigeons and I'm sitting on a bench on
a street corner in the middle of a very busy
street in a city, You're still talking about nature. So
I think even in this book Black Nature by Kameilite Dungeee,
she really takes an expanded view of what nature is
(06:43):
and that often includes the urban environment. So from my
experience and reading all the different scholars takes on what
nature poetry is, there is a lot of leeway, Like
there's a lot of wiggle room. But the way that
I'm thinking about it today and for the purposes of
our conversation today, I'm thinking about nature as things that
are not part of the human made, human built environment.
(07:08):
In the book Black on Earth, author Kimberly N. Ruffin
talks about what she calls the ecological burden and beauty paradox,
which quote pinpoints the dynamic influence of the natural and
social order on African American experience and outlook. She goes
on to say quote, and the combination of the burden
and beauty resides a story the world should hear. So
(07:30):
put on your sunscreen, grab your hats, get your allergy
medicine if you needed, because today on the show, we're
going to spend a little time outdoors. Part one, Fear
(07:52):
may live here. It's hard to ignore the relationship between
nature and horror. In the Black American imagination and in
black creative expression. There are the dangers that we all
face in the natural world, for example, territorial creatures, unpredictable weather,
and toxic plants. And then there's the terror we feel
(08:13):
when we remember that in this world, our interactions with
the natural world have often been hostile and ugly. Even
when everything looks beautiful, even when everything seems peaceful, that
encoded fear reminds us that it's not. There's a reason
Dungee opens her book Black Nature with an untitled poem
by Lucille Clifton. In it, Clifton questions why she can't
(08:36):
write a poem about nature and landscape without there being
some sinister subtext beneath it. So I think it's appropriate
to start with the nature poetry of a man who
was enslaved George Moses Horton. He was born in North
(08:59):
Carolina in seventeen ninety eight, and when he was a child,
he taught himself to read and began composing poems in
his head. He sold love poems to students at the
University of North Carolina, and he used the money he
made from selling them and working as a laborer at
the university to purchase time from his enslavers. But he
also composed his own poems, which were about slavery and
(09:21):
rural life in the South.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Here's part of.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
One of his poems, called The Southern Refugee. The verdant
willow droops her head and seems to bid a fare
thee will the flowers with tears, their fragrance shed alas
their parting tale. To tale tis like the loss of paradise,
or Eden's garden left in gloom, where grief affords us
no device, Such is thy lot my native home. I
(09:47):
never never shall forget my sad departure far away, until
the sun of life is set and leaves behind no
beam of day. How can I, from my seat remove
and leave my ever devoted home and the dear garden
which I love the beauty of my native home. In
eighteen twenty nine, Horton became the first Black American man
(10:08):
to publish a book in the South, and he wrote
the first known poem by an enslaved person that protested slavery,
a poem called Liberty and Slavery. Horton also published books,
and he saved money from the books he published with
the intention of buying his freedom, but his enslavery didn't
go for that, so he remained enslaved until the end
of the Civil War, when he went to Philadelphia, then Liberia,
(10:30):
and eventually back to Philadelphia. In the poem The Southern Refugee,
Horton laments leaving the South, the place where he was enslaved.
The horror of chattel slavery enforced displacement set the stage
for this story, but it's also the story of a
broken heart. His images of gardens, willows, flowers, and paradise
paint a picture of a welcoming, idyllic environment, But nature
(10:53):
mourns for him. It mourns his departure, and he grieves
losing the land. He knows and loves us such a
connection with the land that it speaks to him as
he leaves, and as a refugee, Horton is fleeing a
familiar environment and entering into unknown territory. So there's this
connection and disconnection with land and environment that is a
(11:14):
through line from slavery to all of its offshoots.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Well, I think his work is more of the camp
that humans are a part of nature, and just thinking
about his position in the world. I think he was
definitely closer to the land than a lot of us are.
The way we live. Even being born in North Carolina
in the late seventeen hundreds, the expectation is that you
(11:39):
work the land. But then I imagined that there were
people he was in community with on those plantations that
did remember Africa or had stories from it, and you know,
in a space that isn't like trying to be like
so industrialized and isn't trying to like extract so much
from the land, but you're just like working in community
(12:01):
with it. So I think his poetry like speaks to
that relationship.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yeah, and that might be Well, I don't know if
it's why he expressed such a love for the land,
but I do still think in reading his work it
kind of I don't know if surprised me, but it
definitely had an emotional effect on me. Of how emotional
he felt about it. He really didn't want to leave
this space where he probably saw so many other people
(12:27):
face terrible things, and he too himself also probably had
a lot of difficult times. I do know that in
the story of his life he sold his poems, he
did he was like a handy man at the university,
but all the while he was trying to buy his freedom,
which is very intense and to be told no. So
(12:47):
I am still very taken aback by the expression of
the love that he had for the land without overtly
mentioning the horror at the same time, because as we
mentioned early, there was that burden and beauty paradox. So
a lot of the time we'll see black authors talking
about their struggle between feeling so in alignment and connection
(13:12):
with the land and at the same time feeling alienated
by it. So in this poem, we don't see as
much of that alienation from the land. We just see
his connection to it. And so I don't know if
that's a compartmentalization or if it's just an honest expression
of how he felt, and it's just my projection and
my viewpoint from this point in time of thinking he
(13:33):
has to always talk about the terrors, because you know,
they don't. They lived their lives, They loved a lot
of things in their lives. The earth was still beautiful.
Why shouldn't they enjoy that and be able to talk
about it in that way without always reverting to their trauma.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
I do think it's interesting because I feel like black
people are obsessed with like black first. Yeah, and he
said he was like the first known person to like
write poems denouncing slavery, which I think that's just like
a very interesting first to be why, just because you
would think if there were poets like that would be
like the first thing that you would write about, I think.
(14:09):
But of course it's very dangerous to be writing while
you're enslaved. A lot of people couldn't write in English,
and you know their mother tongue was taken from them,
so probably not like the highest priority to be writing poems.
But it is interesting to have that like first documented.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
To me, it is interesting, and I think that there
may have been other people who had oral poems who
didn't write them down right.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Yeah, even the spirituals their songs, and you know, songs
and poems are like very.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Like it's still verse.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Yeah, so they were condemning slavery and like telling people
how to get the fuck own in a very covert way.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
But like you.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
Said, they might not have been written down and they
might have been like who actually wrote these or like
are they just like a community song?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Right?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
We all made together?
Speaker 1 (14:56):
And Horton he at first he spoke his poems as well,
and he remembered them in his head and he spoke
them and he had somebody else transcribe them who was
able to write, because he wasn't able to write. But
he was doing this as a child. He started doing
this when he was young, and it wasn't until much
later after that eighteen twenty nine publication, I believe when
he learned to write himself. So it's you know, illiteracy
(15:19):
also plays a factor, and unable to write also plays
a factor in this first for him. But as we
know first, there's always some context around first. Yeah. So
the other thing that struck me about this poem is
his use of the word native, because I feel like
that word native can have so many layers to it.
In the end of the part that we read from
this poem, he says the beauty of my native home,
(15:43):
So he uses that word native, and I think that
can be a heavy word because I mean, people were
kidnapped from Africa and had to come overseas to get here.
And he still considered not just this soil, but the
southern United States his native home because he could have
(16:03):
just at home, but he chose to add the qualified
native on top of it. So that shows just how
strongly he felt that is the place where he belonged,
is the place he loved, and how much of a
connection he had with that land.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to just
like Black Americans being like very nomadic people and being
like forced nomads, right, like we were taken from Africa.
But then you know, like we're here, we're born here,
we have family here, we make culture here, and so
at some point, for better or for worse, this is
(16:38):
like our home. And he even left and went to
Liberia and then came back to the United States. So
I feel a question people still have today like can
we go back or is this where we're supposed to
be at this point?
Speaker 1 (16:52):
And there's the act of claiming that's happening in this
poem as well, which is also another thing that comes
up a lot.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
So he went back to.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
Liberia for a minute, there is evidence of that happening,
and then he came back, so there was something pulling
him back. I'm not sure if anybody knows what happened there. Yea,
they have records of him getting on the ship and
going over there, and they have records of him coming back.
But the reason is why we don't have We don't
have diaries from this man that I know of that
tell us that. So that's unknown. Part two. But we
(17:44):
must work. So we've talked about this tug of war
happening in the consciousness.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Of black people. We've talked about how.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
We see nature's beauty and duty only to itself, while
also realizing that we have been divorced from our connection
to it. The fear, alienation, and pain that we feel
and relation to nature sometimes shows up in nature poetry
in scenes where rich and wonderful landscapes are interrupted by
illustrations of or allusions to violence. But another thing that
(18:12):
black nature poetry helps me think about is labor in nature,
the kind that we must do because our survival depends
on it, or that we choose to do because it
fulfills us. Because I'm a twenty first century girl in
the US of A, I have relative privilege. I don't
have to toil the same way my ancestors did, just
to put food on their plates. And I have enough
(18:34):
money to pay for the labor I might otherwise do
if I had an economic status that didn't afford me
those luxuries. So as I enjoy nature, and as I
realize how much I don't know about it, I think
about how much environmental knowledge and practical experience my forebears
had to have.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
We have sown, we have reared, and we have grown.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
In some nature poems, we get to see black people
loving the earth, using tender hands to touch soil and
water gardens, and using calloused hands to dig dirt and
harvest vegetables. It is difficult, but it's our duty. I
can think about how. In the Palm Sorrow Home by
author Margaret Walker, the speaker longs for southern land. She
(19:18):
says this, I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane.
I want to walk along with sacks of seed to
drop and fallow ground. And I can think about Anne Spencer,
a poet, activist, and gardener, and everything she said about feeling, seeing,
smelling and touching and speaking of Anne, there's the poem
to a Certain Lady in her Garden by Sterling A Brown,
(19:40):
which was for Anne Spencer. Here are a couple of
stanzas from that poem. Surely I think I shall remember this,
you and your old rough dress, bedaubed with clay, your
smudgy face, parading happiness, life's puzzles solved. Perhaps in turn,
you may, one time, while clipping bush tending vines, making
(20:02):
your brave sly mock at dastard days, laughed gently at
these trivial, truthful lines, and that will be sufficient for
my praise.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
He really saw her. Yeah, to be seen in that
way lovely.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
Yeah, I really enjoyed that. It felt so celebratory. I
was like, I want somebody to write a poem for me,
and a good one. I love the joy that I
feel like he felt in writing it, and the joy
that he saw in her, and not just in her gardening,
but also like in the messiness around her gardening. So
(20:38):
he appreciated all the flaws that came up in the
act of her like tending to the land. And I
think that also feels like an image that I seen
so many black women do, is like them working in
their gardens and kneeling down in their gardens and getting
their hands dirty or maybe wearing gloves. You know, it
can be nostalgic, but also very typical pastoral image that
(21:01):
is typical of a lot of other nature imagery in
nature poetry of people gardening and these blooms and flowers
and greenery.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
It's very verdant. So I really liked that about this.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
It felt very simple and wholesome, and it also felt
like kind of a meta narrative because we're sitting there
imagining and in her garden. But she often also wrote
about her garden herself in her poems that.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
She did because she's also a poet, so.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
It's like her in her element, is her in this
very free space. And there's another part of the poem
where Starling A. Brown does this juxtaposition between the street
that's right there by the home and the garden itself.
So he calls the streets things like dingy, and he
says the noise is futile or something like that, and
(21:52):
he says they're silly. So he's attaching these negative characterizations
to the human built environment that is literally right there
next to this act of creation, and it's taking in
her garden, And in my mind, I'm forming these images
of gray drab street right up against the greens and
(22:15):
all of the other colors of her garden, and it
makes it seem like it's this haven for her.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Lots of fun imagery.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Yes, lots of it. Part three Then rest a while,
(22:48):
so Kabi.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
As we've made clear, black people have a complicated relationship
with nature, but black poets did write about their relationship
with nature outside of its wrong as a setting for
trauma and subjugation. Through Black nature poetry, we get to
see how black people enjoy their environments. We get the romance, pleasure,
(23:11):
and pastoral softness that black poets were deemed incapable of.
For many years, people believed black folks were, as poet
Evi Shockley put it, uncomfortable in nature. Now, I don't
think nature poems by Black Americans can be completely divorced
from their social and historical context. And that's where I
(23:31):
think what you talked about earlier coming in Katie, how
there was that human element in George Horton's work how
it came into his even though his imagery.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Was all about nature.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
It would be hard for a black nature poem to
be all leisurely and sublime or all tragic. But there
is a middle ground where we lay in the bliss
and splendor and stay awhile take Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson.
She lived to be eighty eight, but she only published
poet Tree from the nineteen twenties to the mid nineteen thirties.
(24:03):
Poets James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost praised her writing.
In nineteen thirty three, her last published poem, Let Me
Sing My Song, appeared in the journal Challenge. After this point,
she continued to write privately, but she stopped publishing poetry
by nineteen thirty five. Family life consumed her attention. Still,
(24:24):
more than half of her poems included nature themes. Here's
part of one poem titled Fulfillment. In it, she uses
examples from the natural world to express the simple joy
she finds in everyday life. To lean against a strong
tree's bosom, sentient and hushed before the silent prayer it
breathes to melt the still snow with my seething body,
(24:46):
and kiss the warm earth tremulous underneath, and even in death.
Johnson planned to hold nature in high regard. Her association
of nature with humility, beauty, and freedom is evident in
her poem and vacation. Let me be buried in the rain,
in a deep, dripping wood, under the warm, wet breast
(25:09):
of earth, where once a gnarled tree stood, And paint
a picture on my tomb with dirt and a piece
of bow, of a girl and a boy beneath a
round right moon, eating of love with an eager spoon,
and vowing an eager vow. And do not keep my
plot mode smooth and clean as a spinster's bed. But
let the weed, the flower, the tree, riotous, rampant, wild
(25:33):
and free grow high above my head.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
I think this is my favorite poem. Oh why I
think it shows that kind of what I'm saying, Like
we are nature, and she put herself in it and
trying to like not make it bend to her. Because
when you think of cemeteries, they're really manicured. A lot
of them be called like Memorial garden, but it'll be
(25:59):
full of like fake flowers by the graves. But she
was just kind of saying, let me just be here
and let nature do what it do, and I'm gonna
do what I do, and we're just gonna be in
harmony because we are like one thing. That's what I
got from it.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
M hm. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Beneath is that feeling of returning. Yes, it's like this
is where I came from, this is what I'm going
back to. And it has environmentalist tones too, like it's
it feels like a green burial, like it's not much interference,
not much interjection of human made materials that she mentions
in here. She does mention wood interesting because you kind
(26:38):
of associate with with caskets, so I feel like it
calls that up. But that wood is about the forest itself.
She's talking about that and the use of that word.
So she talks about using dirt and a piece of
bow rather than engraving and engraving in a tombstone. So
she purposefully seems like intentionally uses more natural words rather
(26:59):
than some other things. Yeah, so I'm imagining a very
wild place rather than a manicured place when I think
of this poem, and I think I really like this
one too. I think it is also my favorite of
the ones that we talked about today. And it feels like,
even though she only published work for such a short
period of time, like over the course of a decade,
she packed so much into it.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
And she also got published a lot in a very
short time. I'm like, girl, you go, but it's what
I get. Yeah, this is what we get. So yeah,
I really like that.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
And one thing I think in general about Black nature
poetry and why I like it so much, is because
for me, it kind of replicates the feelings that I
have when I'm in nature, even when I'm not in
nature when I'm reading them, So I am so frequently
overwhelmed and overcome by all the feelings that I have
that aw the fear, the wonder. I am wondering what
(27:53):
my place is in this soil, you know, I have
all this history. If I'm in the South, in like
a rural place, you know, I might be What's gonna
happen to me? If I'm sleeping in a tent at night,
I might be thinking about the animals that are around me,
the creatures that are around me, or if there are
other people involved, there might be actual questions that I
have come from other people, like I've asked people to
(28:15):
camp with me and they're like, I'm kind of scared, Like,
what's gonna happen. There're gonna be a bunch of white
people there. And I've had to have that conversation with people.
It's like we're also in danger in the city, you know,
like I get it, this is something that you haven't
done before, but like, let's talk about this fear and
why it's coming up. So all of those feelings that
I have are multitudinous that I could go on about
(28:36):
forever and ever. My knowledge that I have of the
land and how I have still so much to learn
to learn. Every time I go out and do something
like hiking camp or go on a nature walk where
some scholars talking and I'm learning this thing about what
my ancestors did to be able to find their ways.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
It's like so much that I'm.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Thinking about and that I'm holding even if I'm not
thinking about it, I'm just carrying it in my body.
And I think poems about nature, poetry by black people
help me tap into that without having to overthink it.
I don't need a think piece for it. I don't
need a four hundred page book of nonfiction essays for poems,
I can just sit with them and I can get
(29:16):
more of an understanding that other people before me were
thinking about it. The ways that they work through them
was by writing, and that's helping me today. And some
things were different, some things were the same. But I
just really appreciate how I can let go of so
much of the act of thinking when I'm reading poetry
(29:40):
about nature and tune into the act of feeling. That
feels very productive and trying to parse those feelings about nature.
So in honor of rest, renewal, and regeneration, I'll leave
everyone with the end of a poem by the first
writer we talked about today, George Horton. This one's called
(30:01):
on Spring inspiring months of youthful love. How oft we,
in a peaceful grow survey the flowery plume, or sit
beneath the sylvan shade where branches wave above the head,
and smile on every bloom exalted months when thou art gone,
may virtue then begin the dawn of an eternal spring.
(30:22):
May raptures kindle on my tongue and start a new
eternal song which ne'er shall cease to ring.
Speaker 3 (30:42):
And now it's time for roll credits, the segment where
we give credit to a person, place, or thing that
we encountered during the week eves. Who are what would
you like to give credit to today?
Speaker 1 (30:55):
I will stick with the black nature theme and I
like to give credit to the book A Darker Wilderness
Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars edited by Aaron Sharky.
That is not a book of poetry, that is a
book of essays. But if you're interested in this kind
of thing of reading more about black nature and being
steeped in that world, then I would recommend to read cool.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I would like to give credit to honey mangoes. They
are in season and I just live for that, because
you know, the peach plant, the peach crop last year terrible,
But them honey mangoes, they gonna do it. And they're
only in season for a little bit in Georgia at least,
(31:40):
and I want to get a shout out at him
because they delicious.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
Was it just the Georgia peach crop last year?
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Or I think because you know Georgia does it and
it South Carolina. I think South Carolina do it more
than Georgia, even though we do peach date I'd be
seeing California peaches in the Georgia grocery store and they
just was not it year. But I think it was
something with, you know, the environment, Like I don't know
if they there's like a cold shock or something happened
where a good, good, good amount of it was just
(32:10):
destroyed and the ones that weren't were that good.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, all my family members they swear by South Carolina
peaches over Georgia peaches. Like everybody knows that South Carolina
peaches are better than Georgia was.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
I can see that.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
You know, I'm not gonna I'm not even gonna fight
nobody on that. Okay, you got a better peach. Okay,
you're the real peaches.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Go off. Rather be a peach than a pow meadow?
Is that they're the power meadow state? Yeah? What is that?
It's a tree?
Speaker 3 (32:41):
Oh not even I don't know why.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
I'm trying to cause beef between different species of plants.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And I'm really not shout out to palmeatos and peaches.
Can you eat a pal meadow? No you can't. That's
actually fair.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
So hey, one provides sustenance, the other provided oxygen.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
I guess true. But the p street also provides oxygen.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Yeah, well, Katie's clearly on the side. So everyone who
wants to stand up from pal Meadows, please let us know.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
In the spirit of spring and rest, we are going
on our own spring break to get back to nature
to be creative, and we will be back June sixth
with all new episodes. What are some of the things
you're excited to explore during our spring break, Eves.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
I am looking forward to get out into nature for real,
Like I think, I want to do a little bit
more camping, and it's the time of year that's perfect
to do that. I mean, all times of year can
be perfect in different places for whatever your speed is.
But yeah, I want to do some more camping. I
haven't done enough this year.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
I'm excited to be in them books, reading, and you
can look forward to episodes hearing from different archivists and
the funny, funny stories that they've found while in the archives.
We'll also be talking to a children's literature expert about
(34:16):
the lessons kids that passes down from us to our
little ones.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
And you can also look forward to episodes about black
muses and the history of visual arts, and also crunk
music and snap music. As you know we hear are
Atlanta supremacists. So while we're on this break, you can
go back and listen to episodes of on Theme that
you haven't listened to before, or you can re listen
(34:43):
to episodes that you haven't heard already, or you can
just let people know about the show and y'all stay
subscribed because all of our lovely episodes are coming in June,
so make sure you're following us on social media. To
keep up with us, we are at on them Show
on Instagram. You could also keep up with us on
(35:04):
our website. Go and read show notes at on Theme
dot Show.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
See y'all after the break. Bye.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media.
This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell.
It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us
on Instagram at on Themeshow. You can also send us
an email at hello at on Theme dot Show. Head
to on Theme dot Show to check out the show
(35:38):
notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.