Margo Taft Stever

When I was preparing to teach a challenging eight hour a day, five days a week Zoom course on Poetry and Bioethics for the Bioethics Department in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University in January, 2021, I studied “Jubilate Agno,” by Christopher Smart, written between 1759 and 1763, but not published until 1939. Smart’s poem is now considered one of the first and most engaging ecopoems ever written. Because Smart provided so many close observations about his now famous cat, Jeoffry, I decided to use “Jubilate Agno” as the model form in my writing of “For I Will Consider the North American Beaver.”

My motivation for writing a poem about beavers developed after my spouse served on the board of an environmental organization that provided stewardship for thousands of acres of undeveloped land in New York. After a beaver family disrupted the tranquility of a man-made wildflower island that they had created on a man-made lake for the enjoyment of their members, several of them decided that they wanted to trap and kill a beaver family. During my spouse’s tenure on the board, he was able to fight for the beavers’ survival, but soon after his term was up, the beaver-killers united to influence the board to vote to eliminate them. Instead of live-trapping and moving them to a safe location, the board and staff decided to kill-trap them by drowning. Several of the staff stated that their Ph.D. degrees provided adequate justification for their unconscionable deeds.

Because I was horrified by the family’s forced drowning, I searched for books about the beaver to better understand my loss. I was delighted to find Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018). To write my poem, I took notes and divided them into two parts, one on what is outstanding about the beaver and the other on atrocities that humans have inflicted on them. In the 1800s, those engaged in the beaver trade almost entirely wiped out the species.

For this poem, I concentrated on how the beaver has accomplished much more environmental good than most other creatures, especially more than humans, when one computes the destruction that we have wrought. Goldfarb’s book includes information on how to live-trap and relocate the beaver, and I was fascinated to discover after reading “The True Story Behind Idaho’s Parachuting Beavers,” Julia Zorthian, (Time Magazine, October 23, 2015) that in 1948, seventy-six of them were parachuted to establish flourishing new beaver communities in Idaho. Needless to say, beavers could even more easily relocate without the parachute.

Heather Truett

Heather Truett on “In Case of Apocalypse, Break Poem”

I kept a journal during the early months of COVID. Each entry is made of bullet points, news headlines, statistics, and death counts. I couldn’t process the big picture, but felt it was important to document the days, if only to share with a grandchild doing a history project sometime in the future.  Maybe that’s how I made myself believe there would be a future when so much of the world seemed to be ending.

I am prone to big dramatic feelings. Those feelings are often difficult for me to communicate, mostly because they are difficult for me to identify. When I write a poem, I search for my own emotions, teasing apart each tiny thread to see what made them tangle. Eventually, that resulting poem might be used to communicate with others, but the writing always starts as a conversation with myself.

“In Case of Apocalypse, Break Poem” is an aggregate of my thoughts while, day after day, staring out the window by my desk, a desk I purchased to create a home office space from which to work while the world burned around me, complete with pink mug warmer and a cheerful aqua laptop mat. I desperately nested in my home, trying to calm the fear. Out the window, there was a blue heron. He used to fly away as soon as I came near the window, but over time he got used to my presence. Now we sometimes share our morning routines, my freshly brewed coffee and his freshly caught fish. As I Zoomed into graduate school classes, church services, and publicity events for my first novel, the wildlife in my backyard kept me company. 

How had I missed the pleasure of a whole ecosystem existing just through the glass? I’d lived in this house for years, but only in 2020 did I get a pair of binoculars and spy on the baby ducks on our pond. I was invested in the drama when mama duck vanished and daddy duck took over childcare duties. I read bird books and celebrated the birth of five baby geese, all named Ryan. When the screaming sickness of society became too much, I zoomed in on nature instead of doom-scrolling more hours away.

I told a friend I had no idea how to write a craft essay about this poem. It didn’t feel crafted. Yes, I fiddled with the line breaks, nipped and tucked, added caesura, questioned my form, all of the craft things poets do. But all of that was after and in excess. This is one of those pieces that poured out of me, sitting by that window, filled with posts from social media, all of the complaining and belittling and missing of every point. My husband kept asking, “why are you so angry,” and this was why. My anger melted into sadness with the writing of this poem, and I swore to do better. 

I’m trying every day to do better, to stop by the backdoor when I first wake up and note the sunrise over our pond, the new geese couple that just moved in, the tiny frogs that cling to our windows and torture the cats. I can’t ignore what’s going on in the world at large, but I can pause to remember that’s not the only world, not the whole of the world. The turtle sunning its shell on a log . . . the cardinal splash of red in a rare Mississippi snow . . . even the possum skittering fast across the cove . . . they are the world also, and they are worthy of my attention.

Today, thinking again about writing this poem, I am also thinking of Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.” Berry begins, “When despair for the world grows in me,” and that is where I was when I wrote my own poem. By the time I finished drafting and revisited the piece to smooth its edges, I felt like I could say with Berry, “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”