I’m sitting across from Arim Lee.

This is not a nature poem.

Shit. I’m surrounded by Nature.

Arim is wearing green. She looks like a bush.

This is not a nature poem. I can hear birds chirping.

This is not a nature poem.

Here’s an idea. There’s a bunch of trucks around. John Deere tractor passes by.

Is that nature?

I dunno.

Arim grew up in air pollution central, but her name means “sprout growing into a forest.”

Arim is not a nature poem.

Arim eats salad without dressing. 

M. Martin, why did you ask us to go outside if you didn’t want us to write a nature poem?

God, I feel like Tommy Pico.

I have to write a Nature poem. Capital N. What else is there to write about?

Arim likes to talk to people who will roast her back. That’s her nature. Is that nature? I’m saying nature a lot.

I’m reading my poem out loud and I don’t think Arim likes it. “Let’s shut up now. Intense focus.”

If I focus, I’ll start writing about nature.

Focus on the ground.

The path is made of concrete.

I forgot to mention where we are—we’re sitting in front of Andover Cottage. This is where I’ll be living next year. The brick looks dry and dehydrated, like it’s got chapped lips. It’s covered in splotches of white and purple.

The road is dark grey with flecks of sand and white.

Wait. I can’t talk about sand. This isn’t a nature poem. How does Tommy Pico do it?

 

This is so hard.

 

Next to us, there’s a distress button for campus safety. It’s bright red and black, the only thing colored like it fifty meters in any direction.

Cut out all the nature around us, and what’s left? Streetlights. A grey road. An ugly looking house that looks dehydrated. A bright red stop sign.

Construction is happening to our right. What’s happening there? It’s fenced off with a light grey fence, inside all yellow-orange construction vehicles and sheer white concrete mixers and trucks and tarps and dusty blue construction containers.

Anything that isn’t “nature” is pretty ugly, I’m noticing.

The way we build things just has to scream “people,” doesn’t it?

Our trucks and our tarps and our stoplights look absolutely nothing like the rest of the world around us. Every so often, the swathes of nature are pockmarked with bits of uncanny colors or sharp-edged shapes.

A swarm of dried up, crunchy-looking leaves race behind a car full of red glass and white metal.

Nothing quite looks organic about the way that we do things.

I don’t really know how to write poetry, I’m quickly realizing;

this is not a nature poem. I guess I succeeded—this is not about nature, nor is it a poem.

I’m done now.

reflection: I tried to use the same stream of consciousness type technique that Pico seems to employ in some of his pieces. I also liked the usage of his anaphoric repetition of certain phrases, like "let's say" but I applied it instead to "This is not a nature poem." To illustrate my intense concentration on not writing about nature, I tried to rhythmically insert "This is not a nature poem" when I felt the urge to veer away from my intended focus. I also wanted to employ the ideas of contradiction in my poem, and so part of that came with me trying to write a poem but not about nature but I end up writing something that doesn't seem like a poem that is definitely about nature.

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Reflection:
A few lines in page 40 inspired me.

"Science predicts we'll discover alien life by 2025
Dudes' legs on the subway are constantly spreading"
The juxtaposition and comparison inspired me to incorporate similar vibes in my second stanza.

"Nature asks aren't I curious about the landscapes of exoplanets—which, I thought we all understood planets are metaphors"
The personification of nature and the dialogue between Teebs and nature inspired my conversation between the mantis shrimp and me, as well as to even have the mantis shrimp as a character at all.

I also used Google to find out information about what animals can see many colors, and ideas sprung out of what I read, such as the line "the mantis shrimp only sees 12 colors in total", which was something I did not know previously.

The literary term I selected last class was anthropomorphism, which I did successfully incorporate. And this time I used the right definition of it which is applying human traits to an already animate thing.

Sources:
https://phys.org/news/2013-09-mantis-shrimp-world-eyesbut.html
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/artsbrain/2020/03/05/vision-in-mantis-shrimp/
https://www.mcgilltribune.com/sci-tech/shrimp-do-not-see-a-kaleidoscope-of-colours-they-are-just-really-stupid-04012021/

The most important meal of the day is breakfast #sincerely 

Be so good they can’t ignore you #sincerely

Today, you are you #sincerely

Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another #sincerely

Rain, rain, go away #sincerely

Clean Restrooms. Happier people #sincerely

Be a pineapple. Stand tall, wear a crown, and be sweet on the inside. #sincerely

Be awesome, be amazing, be you. #sincerely 

Yr a centaur, tho #sincerely

U wnt fit inside their box #sincerely

I adopted the Pico’s technique from page 32 in which he adds #death after every line. Here I used the word “sincerely” to mock the genuineness of cliche lines that we commonly hear. I choose some widely known phrases, some from Dr. Seuss and Albert Einstein and one that I saw in the bathroom. The purpose of this was to push back against nature of the emotional attitude that we're supposed to carry, which is to be happy, positive and hopeful. Similarly,  Pico uses #death after commonly “American” lines to push back against the promising life of the American dream. I choose the Sun, an essential part of "nature", to be allegorical to happiness. 

Between trees or seasalt or tiny bits of moss
And I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care

Down south, there’s a lady who calls herself

An artist and my grandmother.

We can agree on only one of these things.

Before I’m old enough to pick up on the creases

In his eyebrows, I ask my dad if he’ll send her a card

For Mother’s Day. He says,

On vacation one night I slip into the bathroom

To brush my teeth before bed and hear her talking to my mom.

The kids call me Grandma, she says.

My tongue gets all heavy. Have I gotten it wrong?

I start calling her Nancy.

On Sundays, she sits in her porch and paints flowers,

Orchids, mostly. And hummingbirds with long beaks

And still-life bouquets. She hangs up all her work

On the walls and will gush about them if you ask,

And I can’t write a nature poem bc I don’t want to 

Stuff pretty things into portfolios to pass the time.

When my brother graduates from high school,
She buys a bright red Toyota so she can drive

All the way from Jacksonville to here.
She brings us potatoes and by the time
She arrives they have rotted in her trunk.

She doesn’t know what to do with them so she gives

Them to us anyway.

On Sundays, she comes to church and slips a Eucharist
Into her mouth like she believes in God at all.
She doesn’t.

I’m thinking, God if ur out there plz make me nothing like this.
 
As a kid, I used to brag all the time that my grandparents
Lived on a sailboat called the Silver Seas. They were the
Sweetest kind of pirates, I’d say—the ones who had people at home
To call and birthday songs to sing—
Only they didn’t call. 

How long does it take before the letters that spell family
All scramble and all we have in common is a last name?
Like, there are thousands of Rowland families in the census

Records and most of them aren’t mine.

The day before we leave town

She is too many glasses of wine deep to have a filter

And when I tell her I have a friend named Oleander

She tells me about the oleander tree several

Blocks down the street

With its pink poisonous flowers.

She tells me how when the cancer got bad in my grandfather,

She dreamed about oleander buds slipped into his food.

That’s not the kind of nature I would write a poem about.

details taken from Nature Poem: 
"I can't write a nature poem bc..." (2)
"That's not the kind of nature I would write a poem about" (7)
narrator speaking directly to God (23)

I used Pico's work to frame the beginning and end of this, that way I had a sense of where to start and end.

Literary term I used: repetition (a little subtle, but "I can't write a nature poem bc" and "on sundays" are both repeated

u forgot to knock before u frisked our homes

hurtled through our hackneyed existence

jostled our pictures from their frames.

U orphaned our young,

disembodied our town,

and in the haloed light of your

BLAST

harrowing truths: 

fatalities unfathomable to man but below your regard

your squall begets squalor

your monstrosity expunges mercy

#blasphemy

dear cyclone,

in ur drunken craze 

u quelled your hunger for

flesh and fruit

unleashed your naked force

over our coastal port town.

fish flew then flailed

we flailed then fell

and now when the tide rises, 
we open our arms to find our past in your seafoam,
GREEDY foamy mouth.

Bones are the bounty of the sea

#blasphemy

Now you whistle through the weeds,

suffuse us in your sunlight.

Like that’ll heal our broken homes.

Now you sing your soliloquy,

in the hoodwink of your moonlight, 

Like a hallucinatory light   

Is apology enough

when all i see is a silhouette of who we used to be.  

I leveraged Picco's technique of integrating slang/informal language by employing hashtags like #blasphemy and abbreviations like u. This is directly analogous to Picco's use of #death on pages 32 and 33 and emulates his irreverence. The literary device I zeroed in on was repetition, which attributes a sense of pervasiveness to the repeated term—in this case, I sought to emphasize the frequency of natural disasters (if my poem was longer, the repetition would be more effectual) by concluding both stanzas with #blasphemy.

Let’s say the world didn’t exist

That the planet was just a vast abyss of nothing

Because the planet is dying

Fukushima is fucking frying our future  

And we have no retreat from this threat of mass destruction

Life and death
Our options wane as we figure our future 

Let’s say we go to the Moon

Or Mars

With the rovers n shit, the rocks n shit

Maybe we can mine the minerals to make our machines

Why, who would care if the world and nature did not exist

Inspiration for this poem: My literary device was alliteration, which I incorporated into several lines, such as "Fukushima is fucking frying our future, "rovers n shit, the rocks n shit," "Maybe we can mine the minerals to make our machines," and "Why, who would care if the world and nature did not exist." The "rovers n shit, the rocks n shit," structure comes from page 1 in "Nature Poem." I drew inspiration from Teebs by opening to of the stanzas with "Let's say"  Ultimately, I took the "Not a Nature Poem" concept pretty literally by excluding all ideas of nature from my poem (I paint the picture of an abyss and what we could/should do if the world essentially rotted) to challenge conventional ideals and perceptions of nature and climate activism while drawing upon existentialist ideologies. As an aside, I really wanted to work more toward speaking about our planet, but I ran out of time so I had to end the poem like this. I like it though because I intended the lines about the moon and Mars to be antithetical to nature (the traditional type that we perceive to be on Earth), hence "Not a Nature Poem."

“Go outside! Get some fresh air!”

Violate the earth. Turn it into some

vulgar, bastardized

Gray version of itself. The ones who

decry the others for their

abuse of the land take

Oil. Wood. Water and Money and
seclude themselves from 

the other Green.

Nature is sitting on a street corner. It 

asks us for a dollar, some change, anything

just enough for some sustenance, some peace.

We keep walking. 

We convince ourselves that Nature is a junkie, that it only sits at that street corner to raise money for its next fix.

We say, “Nature must have made some mistakes in life. It isn’t my responsibility to fix that. I don’t have to give it anything.” 

We fail to realize that Nature’s greatest mistake

was humanity.

Perhaps Nature, like us, flew too close to the Sun.

I ended up trying to write in a similar style to Pico, but I didn’t really emulate any one page. If I had to pick one it would be page 22, where Pico first personifies nature in such a clear way, which sets up his relationship with nature in the rest of the poem. I tried to personify nature in a similar way.

For this, I chose to focus on metaphor. Pico’s work is full of metaphors, and at a smaller scale, I included the metaphor of nature as a person sitting on a corner. 

Pg. 28: Hope is a charred skeleton

Pg. 5: Winter is a death threat from nature

Come swim with me to the nurdle patch
Enjoins the circling gyre
Take refuge in my vortex
If you so desire.

Soon I will be nothing more
nor less than all that is left
behind.

Trophies and mementos of the
great and durable
plasticity of humankind

Commentary:
I took inspiration from Pico's lines and his use of Pastoral on page 54: "Here's a short, peaceful, pastoral lyric:" The "pastoral" is a genre of nature poetry that goes back to ancient Greece and Roman times, and popularized in English literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. The pastoral is known for idealizing our relationship with nature and glorifying humankind's domestication of it "the wild" via farms and pastures. Pico of course turns the Pastoral inside out and uses it to condemn humankind's "trashing" of the wild.

The opening line of the poem is a satire on the first line from the quintessential Pastoral poem by Christopher Marlowe from the 17th century: "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"