Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? Most of what follows is conception, not craft. When my partner and I first moved to rural Indiana, we were part of a program whose goal was to reestablish warm season native grasses and wildflowers in our field. We needed to turn seven acres of cool-season hay to prairie—the kind of prairie that existed for millennia before agriculture drove it out. At that point, I had no concept of the range of grasses in existence. The native warm-season grasses (WSNG) have root systems that go much deeper than cool-season ones, anchoring the soil, which prevents erosion. (WSNG also support forms of wildlife that suffer from the lack of biodiversity due to heavy monocultures.) Conversion to this kind of prairie is not an easy task, and it made me reflect about what we mean by the term “natural landscape”—maintaining prairie requires near-constant intervention, at least in the first decade. We wanted to do what was right for the land, but how much intervention was too much?
What are Warm Season Grasses?
https://www.scotts.com/en-us/library/grass-grass-seed/what-are-warm-season-grasses
So that was in my life, and when I read about the work being done at the Staten Island landfill, I immediately related. There, they were even trying to trap the methane given off as the trash decomposed and use it as a power source. There is romance in cycles instead of ruin, and that is a big theme for me: entropy, decay, the irreversible impact we have had on the planet, the intended and unintended consequences, what will survive.
From Landfill To Park On Staten Island
https://www.bristolpetitions.com/was-staten-island-once-a-landfill/
At the halfway point of the poem, I pivot to the Herculaneum, the library destroyed by Mt. Vesuvius in Pompei. There’s poetry in the idea that the very destructive force that charred all those manuscripts also created an air-tight chamber, which ultimately preserved parts of them. So many scrolls were destroyed by our attempts to carefully open them (after there were assumed to be logs and simply burned by excavators!). People have tried a range of techniques (some of which are described in the poem), and only now are we able to bring sophisticated technology to reading the scrolls in a way that keeps them whole.
The libraries of Herculaneum: Not quite destroyed by Mt. Vesuvius?
My first chapbook, World, Composed, was conceived of as a dialogue with the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, who wrote a six-book length poem about atoms. Part of the Greek Epicurean philosophy of atomism he drew from comments on cycles—everything deteriorates eventually. Anything composed of atoms will break down. It’s a matter of time. But the atoms (these ancient thinkers supposed) were everlasting. In that way, there is a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth. Fragments of Lucretius and Epicurus were both found in the Herculaneum. I thought it perfectly fitting that it was only fragments.
Click to order World, Composed by Jessica Reed on Amazon
Click to read about the Roman poet Lucretius
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lucretius
Click to read about Epicurus on Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Finally, there was a Conjunctions call for literature fitting the theme “Sanctuary.” When I write for an occasion like that, I find myself cobbling together unlikely pieces, for the joy of the juxtaposition. In “Rescue” we have a New York landfill, my Indiana field, and the Herculaneum scrolls. The idea of sanctuary held the pieces together—what of an original landscape can we rescue? What of an original text can we rescue? And can we find hope in the fragments?
Click to read about the Herculaneum Scrolls from the National Endowment for the Humanities
https://www.neh.gov/article/herculaneum-scrolls
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was in my great room, with windows that open wide into the field of grasses. That’s where I usually write. There are two magnolia trees just outside the window, and a small lawn that runs right up to the field. The field runs parallel to our gravel lane and stretches all the way to the country road our house is on.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? November 2017
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? Earky working titles were “The Indefatigable Stochasticity of Natural Landscapes,” and “De Rerum Natura and the Reinvention of Staten Island” (De Rerum Natura was Lucretius’s title), —that was when I was collecting ideas, before the emotional heart emerged for me, and then it cycled through “Indefatigable Stochasticity and What Survives,” “Reclaiming Decay,” and finally, “Rescue.”
One addition since the original publication in Conjunctions was the very opening, “Grass, grrrl.” I find I am often trying to assert my right to be in certain spaces, whether physics, philosophy, or farming. When conservation experts or installers of sustainable homestead upgrades visit, my dad (who is my neighbor) is often there because I see him as a partner. Invariably the men start walking and talking with him and push me behind, even though I’m the homeowner and driver of the project. “Grass, grrrl” is my way of speaking to myself, keeping myself in the project.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? The whole book is preoccupied with what can be rescued or preserved, whether that be a natural environment or something as ephemeral as language. The subjects range from a landfill in Kenya to my rural Indiana prairies and barn. There are ekphrastics based on the photography of Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene project (one of these has the book’s title and is about plastic in the Kenyan landfill).
Click to read about ekphrastics poetry from the Poetry Foundation
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ekphrasis
Click to read about Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene project.
https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/the-anthropocene-project
Click to view the photography of Edward Burtynsky
https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/anthropocene
One poem that appeared in Scientific American was inspired by the story of Corey Gray, the LIGO astrophysicist whose mother Sharon Yellowfly, a member of the Siksika Nation, translated the press release about the discovery of gravitational waves into Blackfoot. This poem is also about information loss: layers of glaciers hold intelligence about ancient climates, but as the planet warms, they melt more rapidly, and that information is released. Yellowfly’s rendering of news about a gravitational wave that has traveled from the early universe to just now reach us into her native language that has been disappearing (this required the invention of new words—Einstein’s theory of relativity becomes “beautiful plantings”) resonates with climatologists preserving specimens of glaciers for knowledge about ancient climates before it disappears. Closer to home, there are nights of fireflies lighting up my field seen through the haze of sickness, the task of cleaning out the barn filled with materials beyond repurposing or salvage, and the very uphill battle of reestablishing native warm-season grasses and wildflowers on land that had been agricultural for decades. It is one part of my story that began when my partner and I moved, at age 35, from the Sonoran desert to the Midwest to try a different way of life.
Click to read about Corey Gray, the LIGO astrophysicist
https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/alumni/made-in-the-csu/humboldt/Pages/corey-gray.aspx
Click to read about Mother-Son Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/translating-astrophysics-into-blackfoot
Click to watch the video explaining Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
Dr. Albert Einstein explains the Theory of Relativity
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The hard part of talking about my grasses is the sense of failure and uncertainty that comes with it. We don’t have the prairie that we’re meant to have. Cool season grasses have taken over, and we have to try again.
Then there is the fact that we moved here to be closer to my parents, the presence of family and sense of their mortality. I realize it’s hard to spot in the poem “Rescue,” but so much of my project out here has to do with honoring my parents and the love they have. They keep bees and can food from my dad’s garden. My mom sews. They’re pretty punk rock. My brother lives in Kentucky with his wife and our nephews, and their family carries that same love with it. James and I don’t have children; we have this place.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? Yes. Conjunctions, 70: Sanctuary.
It’s also published in the new chapbook Still Recognizable Forms, Laurel Review Greentower Press– 2021 Chapbook Winner.
Still Recognizable Forms is available by email tlr@nwmissouri.edu or through Laurel Review’s Submittable page)
Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html