Thomas R. Smith

Thomas R. Smith on “Zebra Mussel” and “The Cecropia Cocoon”

Both of my poems in this issue, “Zebra Mussel” and “The Cecropia Cocoon,” are intentionally discomfort-inducing.  While it’s true that, as Donald Hall has perceptively noted, energy in the poem can be generated by setting formal pleasure at odds with non-pleasurable content, I think that the energy in these two poems, such as it is, proceeds from a moral anguish born of our failure to protect the environment and an accompanying dread of the price coming due just a little farther down the road.

I had read about zebra mussels for years before actually experiencing them at a northern Minnesota lake a few summers ago.  At one beach swimmers were advised to wear water shoes to protect their feet from the slashing edges of these tiny creatures’ shells, which were everywhere.  And while the zebra mussels were ubiquitous, there was almost nothing else living in that water, so thoroughly had the mussels scoured the lake bottom.  If there’s a larger point this poem is trying to make, it arrives in the last few lines: “My heart becomes a wet stone / sinking in dismay at how one / so small can desolate its world.”  When you consider how minute we humans truly are in relation to the planet, it’s perfectly OK with me if you choose to substitute accordingly.

Human beings of course must own some agency in the spread of the zebra mussel and other invasive species.  None of these species, though, can compare with our own for sheer global destructiveness.  At the center of “The Cecropia Cocoon” is a truly nauseating moment of culpability which I hoped the poem might at least symbolically expiate.  It’s our moments of unconsciousness that ultimately do us in no matter how responsibly aware we try to be the rest of the time.  I’ve usually found that the small and specific detail provides the most accessible doorway into larger, otherwise overwhelming concerns—in this way, the sticky mess in the jar in our back entry led relentlessly to the problem of our continuing careless abuse of the planet, now demonically ramped up by the most nakedly anti-environmentalist president in our lifetime.  I should mention that in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard tells the story of a magnificent Polyphemus moth hatched in a schoolroom jar that didn’t allow enough space for its wings to properly unfold.  This pathetically thwarted creature traumatized the young Dillard and has haunted my imagination as well, no doubt lending my Cecropia story an added jolt of horror by association.

As I point out in my forthcoming prose book Poetry on the Side of Nature (Folded Word Press), the “secret” subject of nature poetry is often—and increasingly—the felt distance between the poet and his or her subject.  In “Zebra Mussel” I attempt through empathy to close the distance I feel between myself and the mussel, though with limited success; my sense of revulsion is too strong to meet the zebra mussel even halfway.  In “The Cecropia Cocoon” an assumption of closeness to nature is shaken by a dramatization of my unthinking neglect.  The poem leaves me in an appropriate grief that I hope will serve to remind of our urgent obligation to care for earthly life of every species.  We could wish the same for all our necessarily discomfiting nature poems.

Gwendolyn Ann Hill

Gwendolyn Ann Hill on “Cross-Kingdom Transplant”

Gwendolyn Ann Hill .jpg

The poem “Cross-Kingdom Transplant” was inspired by actual science—an article, titled “Crossing kingdoms: Using decellularized plants as perfusable tissue engineering scaffolds,” published in Biomaterials in May 2017, and the subsequent Popular Science story that showed a video of a decellularized spinach leaf carrying, what I assume to be, water dyed red to look like blood. 

Many of my poems borrow from cutting-edge science—from discoveries that I find almost unbelievable, discoveries the scientific community may not yet be ready to embrace fully. I like to stay surprised by science, to think about how science, too, is a human construct and therefore its “truths” tell us a lot about what we are willing to believe in any given time period. Scientific facts have been used through the years to justify racism and to discredit Indigenous belief systems, and have also been used to cure diseases and rehabilitate ecosystems. Science isn’t inherently good or bad, but fallible and imperfect, like any human creation. Because what is true changes as time passes, I insist on staying slightly skeptical of scientific “fact,” while simultaneously opening myself to the most radical scientific possibility, and I think poetry is the perfect place to explore the tension between belief and disbelief.

Because the science in this poem is already sort of unbelievable, one of my biggest concerns was honoring the actual science accurately, as well as honoring the language of science—the sounds of the words—to stay with reality as much as possible. I want the reader to feel like I’m pushing reality, not taking a giant leap outside of it, and that starts with using authentic language found in the article and describing the processes in as much detail as possible, while still creating imagery and using line breaks to make that language and those processes feel more poetic. For a long time, my mentor and I went back and forth with this poem, with him trying to cut out process descriptions while I insisted they stay, because they help ground the poem. I was trying to cement as much belief in the reader as I could from the very beginning, and I felt that I had to show that I understood the science first and foremost, in order to suspend disbelief.

While the science described by this article and video is very real, I also imagined carrying the idea of tissue engineering scaffolds further into the future, into their possible implications, to amplify wonder and play with disbelief. How far could I go with this science before what I imagined would no longer be possible? What might be possible, in the future of this scientific discovery, that isn’t possible yet? Would there someday be whole hearts built out of plant tissue? 

I also brought it home to a backyard garden, to make it more tangible. How real and everyday could I make this science feel? What if one of those hearts were inside me? What if it were built from plants that I myself grew? 

I don’t just think pushing the reality of science, using imagination and poetry, is fun—I think it’s vital. We have to be able to imagine future worlds, future possibilities, that are beyond our immediate understanding. Imagining future technologies is only one piece of that puzzle. I don’t believe that the world will be saved by technology alone. Pushing the reality of science is also about questioning a colonial system, a system that we depend on and have to use wisely if there is to be any sort of survivable future, but also a system that is too often hierarchical and atomistic. I’m not just asking the readers of this poem to believe something that is difficult to believe, I’m asking them to see science differently—as something that we can take all the best parts of to use, while leaving what is no longer useful behind.