Poetic Book Tours
Anique Sara Taylor’s chapbook Civil Twilight is the winner of the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize.
Guest Post
The Nature of Nature
in Poetry
When we think of “Nature” in poetry, we often mean the beauty
that nurtures us. The outer part of the universe that mirrors our own inner
world and provides us with endless, glowing metaphors.
I grew up beside a
natural swamp that bordered hundreds of acres of wild forest, a lake with small
islands and a waterfall. It wasn’t ours, but we were free to roam there for hours in all seasons. I knew
many of the ancient trees and could climb huge boulders left by glaciers, inhale
green fragrances of the pine forest, and scurry down the sharp side of cliffs.
I’d lie down by the
brook, soothed by its sounds. These were my favorite places where I was safe,
and I could sing at the lake’s edge until I was calm again.
I wondered about the
other tribes that had lived there before us, what their lives had been like. In
so many ways, these lands sustained me. But I also understood the lake’s thin ice, the
black water with dark weeds just below the surface that could entangle us and
pull us under. How one could fall in if we skated too close to the edge of
moving water. Of woods so deep that if something happened, if we fell and
couldn’t move, if night
set in, we might never be found.
It was years later
that they fashioned a name for the strange childhood symptoms that had plagued
me from the onset of double digits into adulthood. The undiagnosable symptoms
that followed me as closely as a shadow through ensuing decades. I learned
about the microscopic universes inside me, creatures that spun bacteria into a
mutiny of cells gone wrong — chronic Lyme Disease.
As beauty and
challenge entwine in our world, I try to reflect it in my poems. Both the gifts
and the challenges of nature.
Poetic Tools Often
Used in Relation to Nature:
Metaphor:
Poetry can often
synthesize deep experience because of its non-linear form. Metaphor is one of
its interesting tools. Without explaining, it links two things that are usually
unrelated. This can open up unexpected layers of sensation or insight and bring
about new possibilities. This can spark surprise or awaken, strengthen or animate
life in a poem.
Imagery:
Imagery allows us,
in a few almost picture-like words, to invoke vivid sensations. Visual, yes, but
it can also call upon any of the senses. Plus, movement, emotion, and physical
response. A tool of unfolding, it can trigger imagination to generate vibrancy.
Minute details are often described. Nature imagery can parallel human
experience and in that way intensify meaning.
Personification:
Although also a
form of metaphor, personification is when we attribute human characteristics to
something non-human. This assignment of our emotions, feelings, behaviors to
the non-human can help frame an imaginative link between our own attributes and
those of nature, to envision a more complex intimacy between us.
A Note, the Speaker:
People often tend
to believe the “I” in poetry is the writer, implying
that the poem is nonfiction. But the “I” in a poem can be
the writer, or it can be the point of view of almost any entity the writer
imagines. Therefore, in discussing a poem, the “I” in a poem is often
referred to as “the speaker.”
Below are examples
of ways I’ve tried to work
with metaphor, imagery and personification to create something more interesting
and intimate without explaining it outright, as one would do in an essay. To
leave a new brocade of word, thought and image, open and spinning.
Excerpts
Civil Twilight
Blue Light Press
• To describe
the feeling of emotional emptiness that can be left by the loss of a loved one,
by referring to stars:
“Now only the
brightest stars will ever be enough.”
• Using bird
attributes to render the speaker helpless, as she tries to steady herself
through daily-life anxiety:
“Even lying featherless
in dusk, I carve each day with care.”
• In asking
April’s first-flower
shoots if they question the meaning of their existence, as humans tend to do:
“…Swollen pop of
hollow reed, blushing
bones brake naked through bedrock crust,
…do they wonder
what they came here for?”
• Illness is
also part of nature. How it circles inside us, not unlike planets in the outer
universe.
“Invisible
illness’ eccentric orbits buried inside marrow”
• Even in
graceful language, a bird falling can be the harbinger of human damage to
Earth. Where metaphor allows us to talk about tragedy in a subtle way, and not
hammer the reader with it directly.
“A cardinal
plummets to the ground
like fallen fire, reinventing the darkness.”
• The speaker
refers to self with bird-parts, reflecting that even with difficulties, she
moves forward with whatever she has, the way she is:
“Clutching
bundled words, I stumble
forward, neck frozen between beak & wing.”
• The glory of
eagles mating is straight forward here, but the metaphor is in calling their
ritual a waltz. Waltz, a symbol of coupled grace, beauty in movement. A nod
toward everything in the universe being connected.
“Eagles grasp
claws swirling
endlessly downward. Can you hear the waltz?”
Poetry and Our
Own Nature Through the Prism of Nature
I am thankful
for the gifts of poetry that split apart linear thought. I am thankful for
poetry’s relationship
with nature that uses imagery, personification and metaphors
to enrich and
enable the poem to enter a complicated experience with fewer words. How this
can reflect cognitive dissonance, magically juxtaposing the fierce and the
beautiful, the sinister and the ecstatic, at the same time. The macrocosm and
the microcosm. And our place within it. Exquisite beauty, torment, death,
nature-driven illness beside the geometric perfection of pattern repeats. (For
a treat, look up the Fibonacci sequence in nature.)
And what may
be the strangest thing about this essay is that the more we look to nature to
immerse ourselves in what is outside of us, the more it refers to us as an
integral part of nature. Though we consider people to be separate entities in
the world, examining our atoms, cells, tissue, even our motion through time,
separation becomes more of an illusion.
As you
continue through your daily life, I hope you will experience our world with an
unfolding awareness of how nature can be more than sun, moon, spring and
flowers.
I close with a
devotion to Edna St. Vincent Millay who more than a hundred years ago in her
poem “God’s World”,
expresses an almost unbearable beauty:
“Thou'st
made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.”
Thanks to the author for her guest post.Anique Sara Taylor’s book Civil Twilight is Blue Light Poetry Prize 2022. Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and her blog, her newsletter.
