#19: Coping is Exactly The Right Word
“The pitcher returns to the mound
after Tommy John surgery. I mean
immediately after …” — “THE MIGRATION” by Michael Metivier, W&S.
Evan Fleischer: So if someone at the University of Houston were to take your class on ecopoetics — let’s start simple — what would they get?
Martha Serpas: They would get about 25% field work — and that would mean going out into the marsh around the Galveston Estuary and also taking a major trip to The Barataria Estuary in Louisiana. That’s where I’m from. It’s only about five hours from Houston, and it made sense for me to start taking the class to a place I knew well — and The Barataria Estuaries are also the fastest disappearing landmass on earth.
I’m going to try not talking about Hurricane Ida until you ask me about it because that’s sort of — it hasn’t changed everything, it’s just fast-forwarded everything. We knew it was coming — I guess I optimistically thought it wouldn’t come so soon.
So we go kayaking with a guide in the marsh. We go birdwatching. We go to the UH Coastal Center and get an orientation to the prairies. And we used to go trawling. So this class is nicknamed Shrimp Boat.
For many — I teach it every two years — and for many years, we went trawling. We were able to be guests on a small trawl boat — two or three at a time — so out on the Gulf, actually participating in the work, and it was great.
The other 75% is — 25% of the class writes their own poems, 25% is looking at The American Shore Ode, a particular poetic form. One thinks of Marianne Moore or Whitman or Hart Crane or Elizabeth Bishop on the beach and — not wrestling, but contemplating reconciling that interaction between the land and the sea. And because we’re such a water-bordered country, that’s a particular American form.
So what am I up to — 75%?
EF: (Nods.)
MS: And then the other 25% — about six or eight years ago, we started collaborating with an undergraduate graphic arts class. And the first project we did were broadsides. That was interesting. Can I tell you something about that? Because that was just really interesting.
EF: Yes!
MS: The undergraduates — when my students gave them poems to arrange on the page and add graphics, etc — the undergraduates didn’t understand that the shape of the poem was part of the poem. And so they totally messed with the shape of the poem and the poets — not all of them freaked out, but some of them freaked out.
And I tried to explain this to their professor many times to no avail, and then, finally, my stubborn self realized that if this was going to be a collaboration, we needed to provide language. And they needed to provide more than just the font size — you know — and the colors. They needed to be able to shape the words on the page. And so we all figured that out.
And then, after that, we started making cine-poems. So my students provide sometime some film and some language and the graphic artists design the cine-poems.
EF: And together that totals up to 100%.
MS: That’s right.
EF: Well, in thinking through this, there’s a lot of — it’s a very practical description of what’s happening in class, as it should be. But the other necessary dimension of this is what engaging with these two particular landscapes generates.
MS: You’re asking about the groove. The groove of the class is about giving up centeredness. Actually, let me rephrase ‘giving up’ — it is choosing. It is choosing receptivity. It is choosing lack of preconceived notions. It’s realizing that where we write affects what we write, even if we think we’re not in a place that is our subject.
The poems I write when I’m in Louisiana are decidedly different from the poems I write when I’m in Houston. And — in some ways — I think enhancement through distance plays a role. It’s not that my poems about Louisiana are better because I write them in Louisiana. Sometimes I think that’s not the case.
One of the things I ask the students to do is to write before we go out on our excursion — imagining that we’re there in order to become centered on the experience and also to recognize expectations before we go. And, I mean — [they] write poems. And sometimes those poems are those imaginative poems are better than those that get written from concrete experience. Sometimes not.
EF: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the almost direct impact of what ends up being created in no small part because of the impact we as a species have had on location — not just in terms of development, displacement, and gentrification, but also how only about three percent of the earth’s land remains untouched by human activity. And I imagine that creates a really interesting challenge when we’re talking about finding ways to de-center ourselves when we ourselves are in so many places.
MS: That makes me think about some thoughts I have about ecopoetry in general. Part of the turn from romanticized nature poetry — which I could also grouse about about being so reductive — was the political aspect of ecopoetry. And then a subset within that which is the — ‘We’re so awful. Look at the mess that we’ve made.’ Which — at a certain point — I felt that not only is this not beautiful — and that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s negative — it’s not beautiful and it’s not helpful.
So definitely part of this is advocacy. I mean ‘this’ — meaning, the poetic project or the ecopoetic project that I’m in, that I’m trying to foster with my class, is paradoxical. My home is dying — it might be dead now after Ida — and I still want to advocate for it.
It reminds me of what Rabbi Tarfon who said, “You are not required to complete the work, nor are you free to desist from it.” I will continue to advocate for the work, even though I know it’s already gone.
EF: Should I use that as a transition to talk about Ida, then?
MS: Yeah, sure.
EF: You don’t have to!
MS: No, it’s okay. I just came back — when we stopped being able to trawl — I mean, we could trawl, but I haven’t figured it out yet. We started going to Louisiana University’s Marine Consortium in a place called Cocodrie, Louisiana. It’s — you know — one of those fingers, very forced out.
And we stay there. And it’s just the environ — it’s just the marine biology environ — nobody’s there on the weekend we’re there except the couple of people who are taking us out on the boat and the woman who’s giving us an introduction to the barrier islands.
But we’re walking the halls of these amazing biology labs — I mean, I think that in itself is transformative. We can think of ourselves — instead of ‘in workshop’ — in labs. You know, workshop is so ‘project’ oriented and the lab is so open-ended, so exploratory, so not teleological.
So I used to dig that, right? We get our introduction, we go out in the boat, we go to look at some marsh mediation — that’s a whole other story; political fights over how best to save the marsh, and maybe fifty years ago there was something to be done, but everybody’s been fighting too long about how to do it.
So this year we couldn’t go because they sustained so much damage from Ida. So instead we went to go volunteer with The United Houma Nation, which is a tribe that’s recognized by the state but not by the federal government. And so we had a very different kind of experience.
My class this year is amazing — I told them, ‘We might be sleeping on the ground. There’s nowhere to stay there. There is no power. There is no water.’ I was trying to figure out what to do, and — in the end — the Houma leaders gave us field tents. Like, we actually had tents. We slept on cots. It was amazing. I couldn’t believe it.
Before we got hooked up with them, I drove them down to Grand Isle, which is the last human-inhabited island off the coast of Louisiana, where I spent … So — Grand Isle is the site of The Awakening, right? The canonical novel by Kate Chopin. And it’s where I spent my summers as a kid — at least, part of my summer.
So I took them there — and that’s where Ida came ashore. Since being a kid, years of longing to be able to stay on Grand Isle — I had a little beach shack, really. And of course it literally blew away — like, Wizard of Oz-style. Like — the wind picked it up and dropped it 500 feet later.
That place is flattened. In a lot of places. The wind gusts were 180-190 miles per hour. So it was like a severe tornado touchdown — oh, and crawled over 55 miles for six hours. I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s not a power pole standing. Those people aren’t going to get power ‘til January at the earliest.
So the first time I went down, I felt so lucky — one of my friends let me sleep on an air mattress in her living room with 10 other people. Because there are so few places people have — you know — intact houses.
So thank you for listening to that. It’s, y’know, what can I say? And that hurricane ended up in New York and New Jersey. And every major hurricane from now on is going to end up somewhere more powerful every time because we lost so much marsh. And we lost Grand Isle to buffer. That’s — people don’t understand. Like, it’s, ‘Oh, New Orleans is okay this time.’ Well, let me tell you why New Orleans is okay this time. New Orleans is okay this time because Grand Isle took the brunt of it. And when Grand Isle’s not there? New Orleans is 50 miles north of Grand Isle.
So my students saw all of that. They saw how the news cycle works. You know, they saw major oil infrastructure. And they saw how people work hard — and, in some cases, risk their lives — to provide oil for the rest of the country. And so they think twice now about vilifying the oil industry as if there’s nothing positive to it. And, believe me, I’m Ms. Green Energy. But it’s more complicated than that — and they get to see that. It influences their understanding of the complexities of advocacy.
EF: It sounds like this is mixing together two things: (1) an overwhelming experience, but also — two — something you have such expertise in, not just in terms of subject matter, but — like you said — something that reaches all the way back to your childhood. Which, what a unique collection of circumstances — to both see the thing and to know the thing. And then to name the thing.
Is it worth asking about — it doesn’t seem worth asking about — but is it worth asking about — ‘coping’ doesn’t feel like the right word here. ‘Strategies of coping’ doesn’t feel like right phrase when we’re talking about how we approach living through what’s coming even if Glasgow is marginally successful (and I have no idea whether or not it will be successful.)
MS: I just looked up the word ‘cope,’ which I often do when I’m trying to figure out what the word is and it comes from ‘blow.’ And so I think it’s just the right word. I’ll have to look up ‘standing,’ but — to remain standing. To remain standing under repetitive blows is exactly what coping is — so you picked exactly the right word — because, for me — and this is personal, right?; this is about my writing — for me, the blows are beyond the hurricanes. They’re beyond the landscape. It’s much broader than that — how I felt I had this unrequited love for the marsh; and I know ecopoets everywhere — like, do you know the work of Brian Teare? Love the work of Teare.
EF: I don’t! I’m sorry.
MS: It’s okay. I’m glad that you don’t because it makes me look smart. But Brian Teare came here once to talk to my ecopoetics class. And he and I got into a little back and forth about personification and anthropocentrism and I just find that it’s complicated. Personification is complicated. It’s not ‘no, no, bad, bad’ because of the Romantic nature poets. It’s — you know, as human beings, we project onto everything — onto each other, onto inanimate objects as a means of understanding them. So, to me, it’s not a means of avoiding them and avoiding the projection — it’s moving through the projection. And for some people like me, if I don’t make some sort of emotional projection, there’s not going to be a connection for me to move through and see the other as ‘other,’ ‘I’ and ‘thou.’
So the blows for me are beyond just the coastal erosion, climate change, and hurricanes, personally. Those are part of a larger context for me.
EF: One reason why I was resisting the word ‘coping’ is because there are so many practical steps that can be taken to do something about climate disaster. And not in terms of ‘Johnny and Susie have to recycle more’ but in terms of silvopasture, going after Big Agriculture, soy production in Brazil … in terms of the fact that a lot of climate-related technology is going to be coming online in the next ten years or so. So there’s a certain element of precariousness in thinking about all this and that’s one reason why — whenever I think about the word ‘coping,’ which I will accept as being the right word, I still feel some hesitancy because — I don’t know. There are all these seemingly self-evident things in the air and yet … and yet … and yet.
MS: Right.
EF: Is there anything you want to talk about that we haven’t had the chance to talk about yet?
MS: Only thinking about the writing of poems and the increased awareness that the students have of what engages them and what feeds their poems. The belief was — and it’s true — that other poems feed our poems. And the mystery that is in those other poems feed our poems.
Mystery does feed our poems. And there are other places to encounter mystery that students are — I think — they respond to. Because here, we get doctoral students. They’ve come through MFA programs. They’ve come through undergraduate programs. And they want a different kind of experience to counterpoint what they experience in their reading of poetry. In some ways, they’ve had to consume poetry, and they’re looking for something more mutual, I think, the kind of mutuality you can get from nature.
Martha Serpas is the author of three collections of poetry, Côte Blanche (New Issues, 2002); The Dirty Side of the Storm (W.W. Norton, 2007); and The Diener (LSU Press, February 2015). For more, click here.
“Danzig remembers Halloween.” — “FIVE POEMS ABOUT DANZING” by Ryan Bradford, HaveHasHad.
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE NBA SEASON SO FAR:
The great thing about watching this from CJ McCollum is how what he’s doing isn’t necessarily a reflection of him reacting to what Brandon Clarke is giving him on defense. What makes this great is that it’s a reflection of CJ’s work, not just the moment. It’s so smooth that Brandon Clarke’s defense becomes … besides the point. And — in the context of basketball — that’s an amazing thing.
I’m curious to see what happens when the Bulls play the Knicks later tonight — update: they lost, but just barely — but it’s not lost on me that Vučević, Ball, and Caruso are all in the top 10 for Basketball Reference’s Defensive Win Share category. (Ringer’s NBA Group Chat made a point of saying on October 28th that the Bulls “won’t be winning long-term with defense,” which — I don’t know, man … That and the fact that they later beat the Jazz … )
My poor Celtics. I just want them to play well. But I also don’t know what that might mean, given that Tatum’s defense fell off a cliff after he got Covid, and Jaylen Brown has spoken about how uneven his recovery has been since getting Covid. And it’s worth pointing out that the Celtics spent the most time in Covid safety protocols out of any team in the NBA last season, too.
On the one hand, this is mildly encouraging site — you can see carbon emissions falling in the U.S. and the U.K., which you wouldn’t know, given how Certain Senators act, nor if you were focused on the damage that has been done/is coming, as our conversation with Martha Serpas took note of; on the other hand, though — if this site is any indication — China, Turkey, India and others all very much still need to cut their emissions.
A POEM BY LEIGH CHADWICK:
Leigh Chadwick is the EIC of The Leigh Chadwick Review and is the founder and sole member of The Leigh Chadwick Good Enough Book Club. Her newest collection, THIS IS HOW WE LEARN TO PRAY, a poetry coloring book illustrated by Stephanie Kirsten, is available for order here.
THE MAGICAL LIST PORTION OF THE E-MAIL:
A nice profile of who I hope ends up becoming the next mayor of Boston. (Though a few addendums are needed: Wu didn’t declare she was going to be running against Marty. Marty’s camp leaked the info early. I’ve also spoken with someone who told me a story about how — when Marty was a state rep — he took this individual down to the basement of his house in Dorchester to show off a series of empty phone jacks in the basement, saying that all this was for when Marty would eventually run for Mayor, so I don’t quite know what Peter Kadzis is talking about when Kadzis talks about Wu having “a long game.”)
“The University of Wisconsin–Madison is hiring TWO professors in creative writing, poetry.” (via.)
A panel on speculative fiction at the Boston Book Festival run by our friend Quentin Lucas.
Header image via Jon Carling’s Twitter.