Hey, y'all, Eve's here. I know you're ready to get into this episode, but really quick. We have been loving connecting with y'all over black storytelling, and if you've really been loving the show, then we would really appreciate it if you would leave us a rating and review, subscribe to the show, and share it with your friends. Thanks y'all. Now time for the episode. On theme is a production of iHeartRadio and fair Weather Friends Media. You are.
Katie here in Atlanta.
Spring has sprung and I love this time of year because of all the reminders of life. The days are longer, the festivals are popping, the grills are firing up.
Basically, we back outside.
And I love it. And you know what, it feels like a good time for an ode to black nature poetry. I'm Katie and I'm Eves. Today's episode living Breathing Poetry. In the United States, black people's relationship with nature is fraught with stories of human danger. Nature has often been a site of violence, dispossession, and exploitation. Think about lynching
and its association with trees. About the horrendous trips that so many kidnapped Black Africans had to take across the ocean in the Transatlantic slave trade, and think about Jim Crow laws that prohibited black people from enjoying public beaches or limited them to dirty, remote beaches. We could go through a million more ways that people intentionally made nature
inhospitable and hostile for black people. Of course, nature has also often been a site of refuge and a source for survival, but so many Black Americans experiences in nature have been rooted in exclusion and othering, so that relationship has been tainted. We've been forced to interact with the land as laborers and refugees, but we've also been torn apart from the leisure and beauty of nature in so many ways.
We are haunted and we're healing. A lot of people around the world are organizing black outdoor groups and reclaiming their right to be present and feel happy outside.
Definitely, and I am one of those people who loves to frolic outdoors. But I do still have a lot of conflicting feelings about nature, and a lot of them are expressed so beautifully in nature poetry by black writers. They write about the awe, the trauma, the inspiration, the love, the fear. Black poets have written a lot about their
relationships with their physical environments. Those hard to parse emotions that I have when I'm hiking or camping can be summed up in a page or two in a poem, and Black Nature poetry helps me process those feelings, even if the contentment I find only last for a moment. As many Black scholars have pointed out, black writers are often left out of collections of American nature poetry, and nature poems are often left out of collections of Black
American poetry. The book Black Nature, Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Kamil T. Dungee, was the first anthology to center nature poetry by Black American writers, and it was published in two thousand and nine.
It's pretty telling that it covers four centuries of work.
Yeah, because obviously, just like writers of other races, Black people have a ton to say about the world around us. We have thoughts about the land that supports us and challenges us. We speak about the animals we care for and the disasters that destroy our homes. Black folks poems reflect the range of experiences that we have in our physical environments.
When I think of nature poetry, I think of poems that exalt nature and emphasize its divinity and benevolence. It's usually positive, full of awe and wonder. But is that what you're talking about?
That's part of it, but that's not all of it. As scholar ev Shockley explained in her essay Black Nature, Human Nature, there was a lingering perception that Black American poets did not write about nature, and that was propped up by black poetry's association with urban environments throughout part of the twentieth century. But poems that explore the darker side of nature, not just its glory and magnificence, can also be considered nature poems.
So basically anything dealing with the outside.
Yeah, I think so.
And this is one of those things that I go back and forth on because nature really can have like so many definitions, and I think different scholars and at different times have considered nature different things. And whether they're considering it from like a more environmental perspective or they're considering it from an ecological perspective, then nature can mean
different things. It can mean human's relationship with nature, It can just mean things that are outside of the human body and the human scope, which humans' hands have created. But then there are other people who take nature to also include the human because we exist on this earth, and that would include the human form and things that
we do in the built environment in nature. So I generally like to think of nature as things, and I think for this episode as well, things outside that are things that are not human created.
Because even like here in Atlanta, there's Piedmont Park which is full of a lot of you know, trees and animals and water and you know fish and all that, but it was designed by a man.
Yeah, I think the concept of a park is human. But the grass is still nature, the fish is still nature. All of those things were not created by humans.
So so you're talking about the park, it's not nature poetry. But if you're talking about the grass in the park, it is nature poetry. No.
Well, I think if you're talking about the park, it still is nature poetry because the park includes nature. But if you're talking about like a skyscraper, then is not nature. I think the lines do get pretty fuzzy because you can talk about stepping outside your door and you live in an urban environment and there's a green space that uses turf instead of real grass. But I think you can still talk about nature because there might be trees there,
still there might be birds that are living there. And also like there are pigeons, those are still part of nature too. So if I write a poem about interacting with the pigeons and I'm sitting on a bench on a street corner in the middle of a very busy street in a city, You're still talking about nature. So I think even in this book Black Nature by Kameilite Dungeee, she really takes an expanded view of what nature is
and that often includes the urban environment. So from my experience and reading all the different scholars takes on what nature poetry is, there is a lot of leeway, Like there's a lot of wiggle room. But the way that I'm thinking about it today and for the purposes of our conversation today, I'm thinking about nature as things that are not part of the human made, human built environment.
In the book Black on Earth, author Kimberly N. Ruffin talks about what she calls the ecological burden and beauty paradox, which quote pinpoints the dynamic influence of the natural and social order on African American experience and outlook. She goes on to say quote, and the combination of the burden and beauty resides a story the world should hear. So put on your sunscreen, grab your hats, get your allergy medicine if you needed, because today on the show, we're
going to spend a little time outdoors. Part one, Fear may live here. It's hard to ignore the relationship between nature and horror. In the Black American imagination and in black creative expression. There are the dangers that we all face in the natural world, for example, territorial creatures, unpredictable weather, and toxic plants. And then there's the terror we feel when we remember that in this world, our interactions with
the natural world have often been hostile and ugly. Even when everything looks beautiful, even when everything seems peaceful, that encoded fear reminds us that it's not. There's a reason Dungee opens her book Black Nature with an untitled poem by Lucille Clifton. In it, Clifton questions why she can't write a poem about nature and landscape without there being some sinister subtext beneath it. So I think it's appropriate to start with the nature poetry of a man who
was enslaved George Moses Horton. He was born in North Carolina in seventeen ninety eight, and when he was a child, he taught himself to read and began composing poems in his head. He sold love poems to students at the University of North Carolina, and he used the money he made from selling them and working as a laborer at the university to purchase time from his enslavers. But he also composed his own poems, which were about slavery and rural life in the South.
Here's part of.
One of his poems, called The Southern Refugee. The verdant willow droops her head and seems to bid a fare thee will the flowers with tears, their fragrance shed alas their parting tale. To tale tis like the loss of paradise, or Eden's garden left in gloom, where grief affords us no device, Such is thy lot my native home. I never never shall forget my sad departure far away, until the sun of life is set and leaves behind no
beam of day. How can I, from my seat remove and leave my ever devoted home and the dear garden which I love the beauty of my native home. In eighteen twenty nine, Horton became the first Black American man to publish a book in the South, and he wrote the first known poem by an enslaved person that protested slavery,
a poem called Liberty and Slavery. Horton also published books, and he saved money from the books he published with the intention of buying his freedom, but his enslavery didn't go for that, so he remained enslaved until the end of the Civil War, when he went to Philadelphia, then Liberia, and eventually back to Philadelphia. In the poem The Southern Refugee, Horton laments leaving the South, the place where he was enslaved.
The horror of chattel slavery enforced displacement set the stage for this story, but it's also the story of a broken heart. His images of gardens, willows, flowers, and paradise paint a picture of a welcoming, idyllic environment, But nature mourns for him. It mourns his departure, and he grieves losing the land. He knows and loves us such a connection with the land that it speaks to him as he leaves, and as a refugee, Horton is fleeing a
familiar environment and entering into unknown territory. So there's this connection and disconnection with land and environment that is a through line from slavery to all of its offshoots.
Well, I think his work is more of the camp that humans are a part of nature, and just thinking about his position in the world. I think he was definitely closer to the land than a lot of us are. The way we live. Even being born in North Carolina in the late seventeen hundreds, the expectation is that you
work the land. But then I imagined that there were people he was in community with on those plantations that did remember Africa or had stories from it, and you know, in a space that isn't like trying to be like so industrialized and isn't trying to like extract so much from the land, but you're just like working in community with it. So I think his poetry like speaks to that relationship.
Yeah, and that might be Well, I don't know if it's why he expressed such a love for the land, but I do still think in reading his work it kind of I don't know if surprised me, but it definitely had an emotional effect on me. Of how emotional he felt about it. He really didn't want to leave this space where he probably saw so many other people face terrible things, and he too himself also probably had
a lot of difficult times. I do know that in the story of his life he sold his poems, he did he was like a handy man at the university, but all the while he was trying to buy his freedom, which is very intense and to be told no. So I am still very taken aback by the expression of the love that he had for the land without overtly mentioning the horror at the same time, because as we
mentioned early, there was that burden and beauty paradox. So a lot of the time we'll see black authors talking about their struggle between feeling so in alignment and connection with the land and at the same time feeling alienated by it. So in this poem, we don't see as much of that alienation from the land. We just see
his connection to it. And so I don't know if that's a compartmentalization or if it's just an honest expression of how he felt, and it's just my projection and my viewpoint from this point in time of thinking he has to always talk about the terrors, because you know, they don't. They lived their lives, They loved a lot of things in their lives. The earth was still beautiful. Why shouldn't they enjoy that and be able to talk about it in that way without always reverting to their trauma.
Yeah.
I do think it's interesting because I feel like black people are obsessed with like black first. Yeah, and he said he was like the first known person to like write poems denouncing slavery, which I think that's just like a very interesting first to be why, just because you would think if there were poets like that would be like the first thing that you would write about, I think. But of course it's very dangerous to be writing while
you're enslaved. A lot of people couldn't write in English, and you know their mother tongue was taken from them, so probably not like the highest priority to be writing poems. But it is interesting to have that like first documented.
To me, it is interesting, and I think that there may have been other people who had oral poems who didn't write them down right.
Yeah, even the spirituals their songs, and you know, songs and poems are like very.
Like it's still verse.
Yeah, so they were condemning slavery and like telling people how to get the fuck own in a very covert way.
But like you.
Said, they might not have been written down and they might have been like who actually wrote these or like are they just like a community song?
Right?
We all made together?
And Horton he at first he spoke his poems as well, and he remembered them in his head and he spoke them and he had somebody else transcribe them who was able to write, because he wasn't able to write. But he was doing this as a child. He started doing this when he was young, and it wasn't until much later after that eighteen twenty nine publication, I believe when he learned to write himself. So it's you know, illiteracy also plays a factor, and unable to write also plays
a factor in this first for him. But as we know first, there's always some context around first. Yeah. So the other thing that struck me about this poem is his use of the word native, because I feel like that word native can have so many layers to it. In the end of the part that we read from this poem, he says the beauty of my native home, So he uses that word native, and I think that can be a heavy word because I mean, people were kidnapped from Africa and had to come overseas to get here.
And he still considered not just this soil, but the southern United States his native home because he could have just at home, but he chose to add the qualified native on top of it. So that shows just how strongly he felt that is the place where he belonged, is the place he loved, and how much of a connection he had with that land.
Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to just like Black Americans being like very nomadic people and being like forced nomads, right, like we were taken from Africa. But then you know, like we're here, we're born here, we have family here, we make culture here, and so at some point, for better or for worse, this is like our home. And he even left and went to
Liberia and then came back to the United States. So I feel a question people still have today like can we go back or is this where we're supposed to be at this point?
And there's the act of claiming that's happening in this poem as well, which is also another thing that comes up a lot.
So he went back to.
Liberia for a minute, there is evidence of that happening, and then he came back, so there was something pulling him back. I'm not sure if anybody knows what happened there. Yea, they have records of him getting on the ship and going over there, and they have records of him coming back. But the reason is why we don't have We don't have diaries from this man that I know of that tell us that. So that's unknown. Part two. But we
must work. So we've talked about this tug of war happening in the consciousness.
Of black people. We've talked about how.
We see nature's beauty and duty only to itself, while also realizing that we have been divorced from our connection to it. The fear, alienation, and pain that we feel and relation to nature sometimes shows up in nature poetry in scenes where rich and wonderful landscapes are interrupted by
illustrations of or allusions to violence. But another thing that black nature poetry helps me think about is labor in nature, the kind that we must do because our survival depends on it, or that we choose to do because it fulfills us. Because I'm a twenty first century girl in the US of A, I have relative privilege. I don't have to toil the same way my ancestors did, just
to put food on their plates. And I have enough money to pay for the labor I might otherwise do if I had an economic status that didn't afford me those luxuries. So as I enjoy nature, and as I realize how much I don't know about it, I think about how much environmental knowledge and practical experience my forebears had to have.
We have sown, we have reared, and we have grown.
In some nature poems, we get to see black people loving the earth, using tender hands to touch soil and water gardens, and using calloused hands to dig dirt and harvest vegetables. It is difficult, but it's our duty. I can think about how. In the Palm Sorrow Home by author Margaret Walker, the speaker longs for southern land. She says this, I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to
drop and fallow ground. And I can think about Anne Spencer, a poet, activist, and gardener, and everything she said about feeling, seeing, smelling and touching and speaking of Anne, there's the poem to a Certain Lady in her Garden by Sterling A Brown, which was for Anne Spencer. Here are a couple of stanzas from that poem. Surely I think I shall remember this, you and your old rough dress, bedaubed with clay, your
smudgy face, parading happiness, life's puzzles solved. Perhaps in turn, you may, one time, while clipping bush tending vines, making your brave sly mock at dastard days, laughed gently at these trivial, truthful lines, and that will be sufficient for my praise.
He really saw her. Yeah, to be seen in that way lovely.
Yeah, I really enjoyed that. It felt so celebratory. I was like, I want somebody to write a poem for me, and a good one. I love the joy that I feel like he felt in writing it, and the joy that he saw in her, and not just in her gardening, but also like in the messiness around her gardening. So he appreciated all the flaws that came up in the
act of her like tending to the land. And I think that also feels like an image that I seen so many black women do, is like them working in their gardens and kneeling down in their gardens and getting their hands dirty or maybe wearing gloves. You know, it can be nostalgic, but also very typical pastoral image that is typical of a lot of other nature imagery in nature poetry of people gardening and these blooms and flowers and greenery.
It's very verdant. So I really liked that about this.
It felt very simple and wholesome, and it also felt like kind of a meta narrative because we're sitting there imagining and in her garden. But she often also wrote about her garden herself in her poems that.
She did because she's also a poet, so.
It's like her in her element, is her in this very free space. And there's another part of the poem where Starling A. Brown does this juxtaposition between the street that's right there by the home and the garden itself. So he calls the streets things like dingy, and he says the noise is futile or something like that, and
he says they're silly. So he's attaching these negative characterizations to the human built environment that is literally right there next to this act of creation, and it's taking in her garden, And in my mind, I'm forming these images of gray drab street right up against the greens and all of the other colors of her garden, and it makes it seem like it's this haven for her.
Lots of fun imagery.
Yes, lots of it. Part three Then rest a while, so Kabi.
As we've made clear, black people have a complicated relationship with nature, but black poets did write about their relationship with nature outside of its wrong as a setting for trauma and subjugation. Through Black nature poetry, we get to see how black people enjoy their environments. We get the romance, pleasure, and pastoral softness that black poets were deemed incapable of. For many years, people believed black folks were, as poet
Evi Shockley put it, uncomfortable in nature. Now, I don't think nature poems by Black Americans can be completely divorced from their social and historical context. And that's where I think what you talked about earlier coming in Katie, how there was that human element in George Horton's work how it came into his even though his imagery.
Was all about nature.
It would be hard for a black nature poem to be all leisurely and sublime or all tragic. But there is a middle ground where we lay in the bliss and splendor and stay awhile take Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson. She lived to be eighty eight, but she only published poet Tree from the nineteen twenties to the mid nineteen thirties. Poets James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost praised her writing. In nineteen thirty three, her last published poem, Let Me
Sing My Song, appeared in the journal Challenge. After this point, she continued to write privately, but she stopped publishing poetry by nineteen thirty five. Family life consumed her attention. Still, more than half of her poems included nature themes. Here's part of one poem titled Fulfillment. In it, she uses examples from the natural world to express the simple joy
she finds in everyday life. To lean against a strong tree's bosom, sentient and hushed before the silent prayer it breathes to melt the still snow with my seething body, and kiss the warm earth tremulous underneath, and even in death. Johnson planned to hold nature in high regard. Her association of nature with humility, beauty, and freedom is evident in
her poem and vacation. Let me be buried in the rain, in a deep, dripping wood, under the warm, wet breast of earth, where once a gnarled tree stood, And paint a picture on my tomb with dirt and a piece of bow, of a girl and a boy beneath a round right moon, eating of love with an eager spoon, and vowing an eager vow. And do not keep my plot mode smooth and clean as a spinster's bed. But let the weed, the flower, the tree, riotous, rampant, wild and free grow high above my head.
I think this is my favorite poem. Oh why I think it shows that kind of what I'm saying, Like we are nature, and she put herself in it and trying to like not make it bend to her. Because when you think of cemeteries, they're really manicured. A lot of them be called like Memorial garden, but it'll be full of like fake flowers by the graves. But she was just kind of saying, let me just be here and let nature do what it do, and I'm gonna do what I do, and we're just gonna be in
harmony because we are like one thing. That's what I got from it.
M hm. Yeah.
Beneath is that feeling of returning. Yes, it's like this is where I came from, this is what I'm going back to. And it has environmentalist tones too, like it's it feels like a green burial, like it's not much interference, not much interjection of human made materials that she mentions in here. She does mention wood interesting because you kind of associate with with caskets, so I feel like it calls that up. But that wood is about the forest itself.
She's talking about that and the use of that word. So she talks about using dirt and a piece of bow rather than engraving and engraving in a tombstone. So she purposefully seems like intentionally uses more natural words rather than some other things. Yeah, so I'm imagining a very wild place rather than a manicured place when I think of this poem, and I think I really like this one too. I think it is also my favorite of
the ones that we talked about today. And it feels like, even though she only published work for such a short period of time, like over the course of a decade, she packed so much into it.
And she also got published a lot in a very short time. I'm like, girl, you go, but it's what I get. Yeah, this is what we get. So yeah, I really like that.
And one thing I think in general about Black nature poetry and why I like it so much, is because for me, it kind of replicates the feelings that I have when I'm in nature, even when I'm not in nature when I'm reading them, So I am so frequently overwhelmed and overcome by all the feelings that I have that aw the fear, the wonder. I am wondering what my place is in this soil, you know, I have all this history. If I'm in the South, in like a rural place, you know, I might be What's gonna
happen to me? If I'm sleeping in a tent at night, I might be thinking about the animals that are around me, the creatures that are around me, or if there are other people involved, there might be actual questions that I have come from other people, like I've asked people to camp with me and they're like, I'm kind of scared, Like, what's gonna happen. There're gonna be a bunch of white people there. And I've had to have that conversation with people.
It's like we're also in danger in the city, you know, like I get it, this is something that you haven't done before, but like, let's talk about this fear and why it's coming up. So all of those feelings that I have are multitudinous that I could go on about forever and ever. My knowledge that I have of the land and how I have still so much to learn
to learn. Every time I go out and do something like hiking camp or go on a nature walk where some scholars talking and I'm learning this thing about what my ancestors did to be able to find their ways.
It's like so much that I'm.
Thinking about and that I'm holding even if I'm not thinking about it, I'm just carrying it in my body. And I think poems about nature, poetry by black people help me tap into that without having to overthink it. I don't need a think piece for it. I don't need a four hundred page book of nonfiction essays for poems, I can just sit with them and I can get more of an understanding that other people before me were thinking about it. The ways that they work through them
was by writing, and that's helping me today. And some things were different, some things were the same. But I just really appreciate how I can let go of so much of the act of thinking when I'm reading poetry about nature and tune into the act of feeling. That feels very productive and trying to parse those feelings about nature. So in honor of rest, renewal, and regeneration, I'll leave everyone with the end of a poem by the first writer we talked about today, George Horton. This one's called
on Spring inspiring months of youthful love. How oft we, in a peaceful grow survey the flowery plume, or sit beneath the sylvan shade where branches wave above the head, and smile on every bloom exalted months when thou art gone, may virtue then begin the dawn of an eternal spring. May raptures kindle on my tongue and start a new eternal song which ne'er shall cease to ring.
And now it's time for roll credits, the segment where we give credit to a person, place, or thing that we encountered during the week eves. Who are what would you like to give credit to today?
I will stick with the black nature theme and I like to give credit to the book A Darker Wilderness Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars edited by Aaron Sharky. That is not a book of poetry, that is a book of essays. But if you're interested in this kind of thing of reading more about black nature and being steeped in that world, then I would recommend to read cool.
I would like to give credit to honey mangoes. They are in season and I just live for that, because you know, the peach plant, the peach crop last year terrible, But them honey mangoes, they gonna do it. And they're only in season for a little bit in Georgia at least, and I want to get a shout out at him because they delicious.
Was it just the Georgia peach crop last year?
Or I think because you know Georgia does it and it South Carolina. I think South Carolina do it more than Georgia, even though we do peach date I'd be seeing California peaches in the Georgia grocery store and they just was not it year. But I think it was something with, you know, the environment, Like I don't know if they there's like a cold shock or something happened where a good, good, good amount of it was just destroyed and the ones that weren't were that good.
Yeah, all my family members they swear by South Carolina peaches over Georgia peaches. Like everybody knows that South Carolina peaches are better than Georgia was.
I can see that.
You know, I'm not gonna I'm not even gonna fight nobody on that. Okay, you got a better peach. Okay, you're the real peaches.
Go off. Rather be a peach than a pow meadow? Is that they're the power meadow state? Yeah? What is that? It's a tree?
Oh not even I don't know why.
I'm trying to cause beef between different species of plants.
And I'm really not shout out to palmeatos and peaches. Can you eat a pal meadow? No you can't. That's actually fair.
So hey, one provides sustenance, the other provided oxygen.
I guess true. But the p street also provides oxygen.
Yeah, well, Katie's clearly on the side. So everyone who wants to stand up from pal Meadows, please let us know.
In the spirit of spring and rest, we are going on our own spring break to get back to nature to be creative, and we will be back June sixth with all new episodes. What are some of the things you're excited to explore during our spring break, Eves.
I am looking forward to get out into nature for real, Like I think, I want to do a little bit more camping, and it's the time of year that's perfect to do that. I mean, all times of year can be perfect in different places for whatever your speed is. But yeah, I want to do some more camping. I haven't done enough this year.
I'm excited to be in them books, reading, and you can look forward to episodes hearing from different archivists and the funny, funny stories that they've found while in the archives. We'll also be talking to a children's literature expert about the lessons kids that passes down from us to our little ones.
And you can also look forward to episodes about black muses and the history of visual arts, and also crunk music and snap music. As you know we hear are Atlanta supremacists. So while we're on this break, you can go back and listen to episodes of on Theme that you haven't listened to before, or you can re listen to episodes that you haven't heard already, or you can just let people know about the show and y'all stay subscribed because all of our lovely episodes are coming in June,
so make sure you're following us on social media. To keep up with us, we are at on them Show on Instagram. You could also keep up with us on our website. Go and read show notes at on Theme dot Show.
See y'all after the break. Bye.
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us on Instagram at on Themeshow. You can also send us an email at hello at on Theme dot Show. Head to on Theme dot Show to check out the show notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.