By Melissa Tuckey
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| Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. |
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), Smith Blue (Southern Illinois UP, 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006). Her debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W. W. Norton, 2017). She has also edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009) and co-edited two other collections. Camille T. Dungy’s honors include an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowships, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and essays have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, nearly thirty other anthologies, and over one hundred print and online journals. Dungy is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
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Melissa Tuckey (MT): In
both your memoir, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and your most recent book of poems, Trophic Cascade, motherhood is central. In your poem “Trophic Cascade” with regards to the reintroduction of
gray wolves, you write, “Don’t/ tell me this is not the same as my story. All
this/ life born from one hungry animal, this whole/ new landscape, the course
of the river changed,/ I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time/
a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.” I’m curious if and how the
experience of being a mother has changed your art, or changed how you think
about or approach your writing?
Camille Dungy (CD): I
wrote two whole books — Trophic Cascade
and Guidebook to Relative Strangers —
trying to explore if and how the experience of being a mother might have
changed my approach toward my writing, my communities, and the world at large.
My brief response here would be that the introduction of my daughter into my
life has expanded my sense of commitment to hope, to possibility, and to
actively working to build strengthening connections between vulnerable
communities. I am more aware than ever of our vulnerability. This awareness is
partly due to the presence of my child in my life, certainly, but it is also
due to the awareness cultivated as a result of living a politically,
historically, and environmentally conscious life.
MT: The natural world has been a strong thread in your work. And
in Trophic Cascade, many of your
poems address the issue of environmental crisis, or loss. The last year has
been incredibly harmful for both social justice and the environment. How do you
deal with such overwhelm in your writing? What are the challenges in trying to
find language in the crisis we are confronting?
What is your advice to writers who are trying to address the ills of the
world?
CD: I had already finished the poems in Trophic Cascade before the election of November 2016. Which means
that, though I do believe the poems are directly relevant to these times, they
were not written in direct response to the immediate
political and environmental moment you describe in your question.
Sadly, there is
very little about this current state of affairs that surprises me. In fact,
there is very little about this current state of affairs that is new. Our
nation’s disregard for and violent treatment of people it would call different,
would call inferior, would call unwelcome is not a new phenomenon. Though we
certainly have seen an increase in the degree
of devastation and rapaciousness openly sanctioned by our government, the ideas
that this moment of environmental and social/political crisis began in January 2017 is folly. It is a
misconception that prevents us from addressing the crises at their roots.
My advice to
writers is to pay attention. To continue to pay attention. Look at the root
causes of the crises you would address in your work. Every one of my books
addresses political, historical and environmental topics similar to those I
address in the two books published in 2017. I may come at the questions from
different angles, but the questions that concern me, the crises that concern
me, have remained consistent. This work we’re doing is constant.
You know those
people who run what they call centenary races,
or even more remarkably Deca Ironman races? They run ten marathons in a row or
finish ten Ironmen. One after another. Day in and day out, they’re completing
these demanding races. It’s exhausting, I’m sure, but they know what they’re
getting into. That’s what it means to be a social activist, an environmental
activist, a civil rights activist, in this country, in this world. You’ve got
to do the work, recharge however you can, then put in more work. There will
always be another challenge to complete.
MT: I sometimes think the most dangerous thing that can happen
right now in this country is the loss of hope. It is such a cynical time. What
feeds your sense of hope? Are there books you turn to that feed your spirit?
CD: You’re absolutely right. Part of the strategy of this
administration is to force us out of hope. The barrage of new insults, the
constant unanswered calls to my Senator’s office, the installation again and
again of unsuitable judges and cabinet members, all of that is designed to make
us give up, to make us think it will be impossible for us to effect the change
we want to see in the world. Simply knowing that the entire point of it all is
to make me lose hope is often enough fire up my will to maintain hope.
And, my daughter
gives me hope, and she ignites my determination not to allow my hope to be
shattered. I will fight for her and for her dear sweet little friends and for
the narwhals and the manatees and the snowy owls and the elephants. And I will
cry sometimes for all of them, for all of us, and then I will wake up in the
morning and find a new way to fight.
MT: You have a new book of prose and poetry, which seem to be
written simultaneously. Did the experience of writing Guidebook to Relative Strangers inform your poetry in any way—I
mean, do you have a sense that the two forms of writing are in conversation, as
you are writing?
CD: What I do is write one line and then write another and then
another. Some of the lines came out as prose. Some came out as poetry. You’re
right that they were written nearly simultaneously, but I wasn’t thinking about
it that way. I was just trying to write, and sometimes one mode worked better
than another. Sometimes, I was writing prose. Sometimes I was writing poetry.
And then at some point one book called to be gathered, and it was not long
before the other called to be gathered as well.
I don’t know that
the two forms were in conversation for me anymore than night and day are in
conversation. Which is to say, one is very different than the other, but they
are also really not so different at all. They are both actually always taking
place on the planet at the same time. If you take a larger view of the planet, you
can see night and day existing at once. I am beginning to think that this hard
separation we make between genres might be dangerous. We’re into categories and
divisions in this country, often dangerously so. Since one of the things I am
working to resist are categories and divisions that allow us to belittle and
marginalize one group in favor of another, I’ve begun to interrogate my
thinking about all sorts of divisions.
MT: You are tremendously
active, writing, reading, teaching, mothering. How do you make the most of the
time you have for writing?
CD: I don’t feel like I DO make the most of the time I have for
writing. I feel like I am always wanting to be writing more, reading more, and
also mothering more.
I always wish
there were more time in my days. I think that at one time in my life I didn’t
have to sleep as much as I need to sleep now. Maybe I used to steal more time
from myself, as the women poets used to suggest needed to be done for women,
and mothers in particular, to find time to write. I think my daughter has
changed the way my time and attention can be apportioned.
What I’m working
on now is honoring the time I do have. When I’m with my daughter, I try to be
fully with my daughter. Device-free time whenever possible. I try to be
similarly focused when I have time to be with the page. I listen to a lot of novels
and nonfiction on Audible—I’ll tell the world that little secret. It feels like
cheating as a writer not to be reading
everything from a book, but Audible has kept me in books over the last few busy
years. Listening to Audible, I can “read” while gardening or washing dishes or
walking to work. I don’t have much curl up and just read time in my life right
now, but I’m not willing to give up books just because I don’t have leisure
hours.
I’m not as productive as I’d like to be, but
rather than being down on myself about that, I am learning to honor the fact,
and trying to be as productive as I can be with the tools I have at my
disposal.
MT: What’s next for you?
CD: It’s always one line and then another line and then another. That’s
all I can pledge to myself and the world. One day, hopefully, those lines will
add up to something, but at this point there’s no telling what or when that
will be.
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Additional Links
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| Photo by Dave R. Phillips. |
Melissa
Tuckey is a poet and
literary activist. Tenuous Chapel, her book of poems, was selected by
Charles Simic for the ABZ First Book Award in 2013. Other honors include a
Black Earth Institute fellowship and a winter fellowship at Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown. She's received grants in support of her work from DC
Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Ohio Arts Council. Tuckey's poems
have been anthologized in DC Poets Against the War anthology, Ecopoetry, Fire
and Ink: Social Action Writing, and Truth to Power. Tuckey is a
co-founder of Split This Rock where she currently serves as Eco-Justice Poetry
Project Coordinator.
She’s editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry
Anthology with
University of Georgia Press. Melissa Tuckey lives in Ithaca, New York.
