Camille T. Dungy has written four collections of poetry, most recently, Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017). Her debut essay collection is Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W, Norton, 2017). She’s edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. A Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University, her honors include an American Book Award, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in both poetry and prose, two Northern California Book Awards, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: Given your four incredibly diverse collections, your expertise in both eco- and African American poetics, your emphasis on sonic resonances, a recent collection of essays, there are so many places I could begin our conversation. Throughout all your work, however, readers unfailingly find precise descriptions of the natural world, and the borders of self and surroundings blurred. I think of young girls’ first wildfire in What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, migratory birds returning to a pre-abolition Philadelphia in Suck on the Marrow, developing California coastline in Smith Blue, or the reintroduction of wolves in Trophic Cascade. At the risk of simplicity, I’d like to ask with how you go about incorporating non-human creatures and scapes in your poems. Are there special considerations you must make? Do you think of them as teacher? Outright subject? Source of language? Metaphor?

Camille Dungy: I find this question interesting because it is so persistent. The fact that I’m asked it often (though rarely as graciously as you’ve framed it) makes me wonder if what I always have understood as a normal way of interacting with the world just isn’t. By which I mean that maybe I am unique in the fact that the boundary between me and that which is not “me” has always felt infinitely porous. The way that I come to describe my place in the world is always in some way in relationship to what’s around me, and what is around me includes plants, other animals, the quality of the breeze… I can’t actually imagine writing my world without using these elements as touchstones, as foundations for the very language I use to describe that world. So, yes, source of language would be accurate. Outright subject. Family. Foundation. Friend.

CL: I’m glad to hear you say it. I guess I hadn’t realized how much my own sense of self relied on surroundings until I moved to a different hardiness zone and found I couldn’t write anything, (or grow anything) and that I had no names for the trees! But unlike a subject or a lexicon, family or friends require something dynamic of us to be in relation. In “Characteristics of Life,” a persona poem of sorts, the speaker says “Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you/ one thing today and another tomorrow/and I will be as consistent as anything alive/on this earth.//I move as the currents move, with the breezes./ What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle/ ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.” What does it mean to write on behalf of another? What sorts of considerations must you make? How does this differ from poems of witness?

CD: I know it’s saying a lot to claim to “speak for” any of the invertebrates who exist as named or unnamed entities in that poem. In that case, I think of it rather like the Lorax who speaks for the trees. I’m not so much saying I am consuming the consciousness of the moon jelly (those wonderful beings!) or the firefly or the nautilus. Rather, I am speaking up for them. Like we speak up for ideas and things and people we care about. When a bully is attacking a kid in the school yard, to say “Hey! Stop!” is not so much to enter the body of the bullied as to defend the bullied, to speak up for them. Though, often to do that well requires a brand of empathy where you can, in fact, understand what it might mean to walk in the other’s shoes. It’s that connection that gets you caring in the first place. I guess, to me, there are some ways in which I think it is very dangerous not to believe we have most everything in common with most everything else. This sense that we can’t empathize with other humans or with nonhuman life because our lives are drastically distinct and particular…I guess I can’t really go in for that. I am not, in fact totally, different from you is the thing. There are a lot of things we have in common despite the personal and collective histories that also give us our particular sets of experiences. I am as interested in the commonalities as I am in the ways we use those commonalities differently. This is true with humans as it is with nonhuman life. I am interested in commonality and all the potential commonality can breed. To speak up for the life forms of the world in this sort of radically empathetic way is, as you suggest, a kind of witness. It’s also a kind of activism. And it’s also a kind of love.

CL: One of my biggest goals is to practice ‘radical love.’ If I say that people give me a crazy look, and I know ‘radical’ sounds extreme, but it’s really ‘of the root or origin.’ How have your origins—familial, geographical, experiential—set the foundation for this type of empathetic witness? How has this evolved across collections or as your writing concerns change?

CD: We are of like minds, you and I! I firmly believe in practicing “radical empathy.” In addition to being extreme and coming out of a rooted place, to be radical is also to work as a unit—which seems incredibly important to me. I can’t do this alone. None of us can do this alone. Whatever “this” might be. I think, in answer to your question about how I’ve evolved into an empathetic witness…I’d say that my attachment to the importance of a collective good is a result of my upbringing and also my vision of the world. My first book was centered on family: my own kin, my community (both black and female), and also the landscape that surrounded me and made me feel at home. In each subsequent collection, I have continued that interest in community, landscape, family. By feeling grounded, I’ve been able also to reach out past my immediate comfort zones. Because I care about my direct community, I am able to have compassion for other communities as well. This may be because of the diversity of my intimate communities. Because of this diversity, I am able to see the similarities between so many of us. You know the way scientists sometimes remind us that we share a common ancestor with elephant sharks, so that in many ways our genome resembles theirs? I think that practicing radical empathy allows me to see these commonalities where others would be more inclined to see difference. Perhaps it’s a survival strategy: both for me and for the lives I could easily other and thus more willingly destroy. In my writing, this interconnection seems not to limit itself to the now. Frequently, I am as tied to history as I am to the present. My sister is a historian; both my parents are history buffs. Perhaps this sense that the past is alive and electric was a part of my upbringing I’ve decided not to escape.

I gave a reading this weekend at the home of a friend here in town. It was a literary salon, I suppose, where about 20 people gathered in her living room to hear me read and talk about Guidebook to Relative Strangers. I have to admit that, even though I write about my MS in the book, I don’t always read those passages in public. Despite the fact that I know that one of my most important charges as a writer is to be radically honest, sometimes I get shy about talking about certain things on stage. This weekend, though, something compelled me to share this part of my truth at the reading. And, as has happened every time I’ve done so, more than one person approached me afterwards and told me that they, too, lived with MS. And, again, I was reminded that one of the most powerful things about writing is being able to tell a truth that is yours but also likely to be a lot of other people’s. When I write well, I am opening myself to a conversation with people who have often been hungry to share that conversation. This is why it is important for more women writers to be represented in literature, more people of color, more people with varied life situations and circumstances. Each time we tell an individual story well, we build new and broader and stronger communities. We make more paths by which we can work as a unit. More paths by which we can come to know each other’s lives and hearts. More possibilities that we will come to care about each other in ways that stop us from hurting one another. If the poet is maker, to draw on that old definition of the term, then I am thrilled to be a maker of bridges and of welcoming homes.

CL: It’s interesting that even in this response radical empathy shifts into radical honesty, the two of which seem inextricable in that attempt at richer connection. Part of this bridge-making comes back to a refusal to reduce one another and instead see people in light of circumstance or condition, but not as it. I think of the “Frequently Asked Questions” poems in Trophic Cascade, which answer ostensibly innocuous questions like “Is it difficult to get away from it all once you’ve had a child?” “Are you going to have another child?” or “Do you see current events differently because you were raised by a black father and are married to a black man?” in ways that complicate the questioners’ assumptions with a form allowing readers to enter. Or I also recall in Suck on the Marrow a series of unwritten letters a captured freeman composes to his wife; the form’s intimacies make heart-broadening and generation-linking happen. You’ve done such a marvelous job creating these synapse spaces with respect to race, gender, motherhood—so I wonder what forms you’re finding or inventing to discuss frailty or illness?

CD: What an interesting question. It might seem that a writer who is as obsessed by form as I am would have an easy answer for this. I certainly have instances in my writing, like the acrostic poem “Prayer for P__” in Smith Blue, all the rogue sonnets that make up What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, or the Golden Shovel in Trophic Cascade, where I set out to work on a specific form. But even in these cases, there was usually a great deal of experimentation along the way. I can’t tell you how many acrostics I tried before the form and the subject matter aligned in “Prayer for P__.” Writing is so often about trying and failing. About trying and trying again. With this particular condition I live with now, it seems not much different. There are therapies that work for some people and don’t work at all for others. Therapies that have worked for a while for me and then don’t. My medical team and I try and try again. And in the meantime, I try to keep my body and mind in shape through all kinds of exercises. And that helps, too. Really, taking care of myself is a lot like writing! And just like writing it’s sometimes fun and oftentimes the work I have to do to get to the reward, the moments of accomplishment. All this is to say that I don’t know that any one way of writing about frailty and/or illness would work on a permanent basis. I have to try and then try again. Sometimes something will work for a while, but nothing is going to work forever or in every circumstance. That’s how life works, so it’s not a horrible thing to acknowledge, I don’t think.

CL: Not at all. We must adapt and yet, I think that’s also why poems appeal to me, because when the body fails, and when the body fails again, and harder—even as we adapt—it is the voice that rises. Even as you make this comparison, I think about the ways your work comes alive because it is bodily, because it is a lived and breathed thing. So many people think of poems as flat on a page, rather than breath pulsing through a room, so I must ask about sound. I know one of your earlier projects was co-founding From the Fishouse, an audio archive of emerging poets, so I’m curious about the connections you see between the body and the poem, the voice and the lyric?

CD: Sound is so important to me, as is the body. I have always been a writer. The joke in my family is that I was writing since before I could write. Scribbling things on a page that I said were stories. And, of course, they were stories, even if the words on the page weren’t English. For just about as long of a time, I was also learning music. I played the piano as a child, from maybe age 4 or 5 until I was late in high school. Along the way I played several other instruments as well. When I quit piano (a decision I continue to regret) it was because I had a new teacher who didn’t allow me to rely on my ear. I had spent all that time learning music based primarily on the ways the sounds were organized and the way those sounds transferred to my fingers. But this new teacher wanted me to learn to sight read—to translate visual cues from the sheet music to what I was doing with my fingers. That wasn’t as fun (or easy) for me as relying on sound. This new teacher came into my life at a time when I was able to prioritize my athletic pursuits over the musical ones. I was prone to injury, so that wasn’t maybe the best decision I ever made in my life in terms of where to focus my attention, but to this day I understand that if my body isn’t active my mind gets sluggish, too. When writing Suck on the Marrow—involved in that harrowing processes of excavating stories about American slavery—I was also deeply involved in mixed martial arts. For several hours a day, most days of the week, I was fully focused on my body because if I wasn’t I’d get physically hurt. Then, I would leave the gym, shower, and climb completely into my head. This time focused on the body was key to my ability to live in the dark spaces the writing required of my mind. And, though I don’t play piano any more, that musical training, the one that privileged my ear, never stopped being relevant. I am tied to how things sound when I am writing and reading. Musical proficiency in poetry, in all writing really, is crucial to me. So, in the end, what I am saying is that these parts of my life that are usually seen as separate and unrelated feel to me to be directly related and also fundamentally necessary to the development of my work on the page.

CL: Death to compartmentalization! If I hear you correctly, words happen to be your chosen medium for making a way through the world, and so I want to go back a bit to your comment of poet as maker. Trophic Cascade has a series of beautiful Ars Poetica poems, often alongside poems that foreground motherhood. They converge in a poem after Williams’ “Danse Russe,” where rather than dance grotesquely, the speaker writes poems unceasingly, and whispers to her “old self,” ending: “If I admire my fingers, their grip, / the muscle in my arm, breasts / full with uncried for milk— // Who is to say I am not / the fortunate creator of my household?” In a canon that so much assumes literary invention as male, can you talk about the connection between mother and poem-maker? The necessity of it? How or do you see your poems as re-inventing the expectations of each?

CD: I could talk to you all day. Thank you for your careful and attentive reading and for steering this conversation in ways that accurately represent my vision. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember how invisible certain parts of our world have been once people with those experiences begin to speak (and to write). Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals were revolutionary in their openness about her experience with breast cancer. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, a poem that is now considered a staple of the American cannon. When I was beginning my career as a poet, I could count on my hands (perhaps even on one hand) the number of first books that had been published by black poets within ten years of my age. I don’t think that would be possible for young writers today, there are so many young writers of color publishing (really good) new books every year. When I published Black Nature, my literature review revealed a total of about six poems by four black poets published in all the major nature writing collections available at the time. There was a sense that black people didn’t write nature poetry because what constituted nature poetry too often excluded anything but a very particular set of experiences. Today, writers of color abound in the environmental writing conversation, and what it means to be an environmentally-conscious writer has significantly expanded in the past decade. Similarly, though there are amazing models of women who write about motherhood in their poetry, I continue to hear push back from critics who don’t believe that motherhood is a worthy subject for serious poetry. I wish I were kidding, but I just had a conversation about this with an exasperated member of the jury for one of this country’s most prestigious awards. What makes a subject worthy of poetry’s attention is not just that we write about it. We also must attend to how we write. When we attend to both these charges we can re-write our expectation for what constitutes worthy subjects and approaches in literature. We can revolutionize literature. Writing your own experience can, in this way, be a necessarily revolutionary act.

I have always insisted on making a place for myself and my experiences in the work that I publish (as a writer and an editor). Being a mother is part of my experience. Why wouldn’t I write about that? Being black, being a woman, being a daughter, being a person who feels deeply connected to the greater-than-human world: all these states of being are part of who I am. If there has not been a place for all these parts of me thus far in American letters, it’s my job to create that space and to inhabit it with honesty, integrity, beauty, and joy.

CL: Which you do. I have one more question for you—were you to meet someone who had never encountered a poem before, or maybe only in the context of a grade school class, what piece would you give him or her?

CD: I assume you are asking about a poem of my own. The first poem that springs to mind is my piece, “Out of the Darkness” from Smith Blue. The way it harkens to the themes and cadences of ritualistic language strikes me as something that would be approachable to this hypothetical non-poetry reader you describe. Two early poems of mine, “What You Want” and “Language,” tend to go over well when I am delivering just one or two poems to mixed audience. When I read the title poem from Trophic Cascade, people from the audience often tell me how they connected with the piece, and when I read “Characteristics of Life” and “One to Watch, and One to Prayer” I nearly always have people tell me that they found themselves emotionally engaged with the poems. I just named six poems rather than one. This is a nearly impossible question for me. I teach poetry and literature classes, and assign many beloved poems to exactly the kind of student you describe. (Six more poems to explore include “won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton, “The Harbor at Seattle” by Robert Hass, “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay, “Power” by Audre Lorde, “Service Station” by Danusha Laméris, and “Ithaka” by C.P. Cavafy). Usually by the end of these classes people have come to understand that poetry is yet another mode of communication that they can be as comfortable engaging with as they are comfortable speaking with their friends, listening to music, or reading the social media posts. The common thread between all poems I mentioned here and the audience responses they garner is that they describe some aspect of a human (or greater-than-human) experience in ways that are inviting the reader/listener. People who haven’t read a poem since grade school usually have a lot of resistance built up because they believe they will fail if they don’t know how to take a poem apart and describe every component of how and why it is working. I don’t ask this of my readers even though I myself work hard to make the components of my poems do important and necessary work. When I set a plate of spaghetti in front of you, it’s okay for you to just eat it. The spaghetti has not failed if all you do is eat it, nor have I failed as the cook. Some eaters will also try to pick out the source of various flavors and textures. “Is that nutmeg?” They might ask. “Did you puree the tomatoes or stew them?” “Is this sauce in the Sicilian or Milanese style?” Those eaters delight me in a particular way, and I am happy to extend the conversation with them to fulfill their curiosity. But it is perfectly fine with me that most people will just eat the spaghetti and maybe say, “I like it” or “that was just the kind of meal I needed on a cold night like tonight.” I think this is same for poetry. Some of people need to know how the poem was made, but it’s not a failure of the poem, in fact it is a testament to the poem’s success, if people simply say, “I like that. Thank you for feeding me.”