Camille T. Dungy on Nature and Motherhood

BirdNote^®

Camille T. Dungy on Nature and Motherhood 

Written by Mark Bramhill

Mark Bramhill: This is BirdNote.

For poetry month, we're sharing poems about birds from contemporary writers. In her book Trophic Cascade, Camille T. Dungy writes about themes of nature and becoming a mother. The title is an ecological term about how ecosystems go through far-reaching changes with the removal or introduction of a top "trophy" predator. In the titular poem of the book, Camille writes about this phenomenon with the reintroduction of gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park — how their presence had an incredible cascade of positive effects on the ecosystem. And she draws a parallel to her introduction to motherhood:

Camille T. Dungy: In this book there are many ways in which I'm thinking of that trophy creature, that top predator  who's been introduced into my life is my daughter. There are other poems in this book that talk about the loss of elders as well. And I think that we experience this very frequently when key people are introduced into our lives or removed from it, everything in our landscape shifts and changes.

Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of gray wolves
to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling
of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt
of the mid century. In their up reach
songbirds nested, who scattered
seed for underbrush, and in that cover
warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew
returned, also vole, and came soon hawk
and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them
hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade
and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried
runnels where deer no longer rummaged, cautious
as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves. Berries
brought bear, while undergrowth and willows, growing
now right down to the river, brought beavers,
who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.
Came, too, the night song of the fathers
of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark
gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools
of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who
fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps
came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region
until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more
trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river
that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,
compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t
you 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.

Mark Bramhill: In the book, Camille has a series of poems in a form called "Ars Poetica," which means “the art of poetry.”

Camille T. Dungy: …and they’re poems in which poets try to explain why they write poems and what a poem really is. And Trophic Cascade is a book in which I'm reconfiguring myself as a writer who's a mother, and really thinking about what that means, how I can do this thing that I had been trained to do in a really different way. Kind of with a solitude and a whole lot of alone time, how I was gonna manage to do that.

Ars Poetica: After the Dam  

           the floodplains bloom.   the horsetail dies.  the wheat
with its combined eyes eyeing a fat future nods and nods never fearing

           the peasants plant potatoes plant turnips  radish and carrot

                       even the mice leave the hovels and make camp in the fields

when an inland bird calls from the roof thatch the boatwright turns
          from bowsprits and trains his son to cobble

                                   only the bright-chested bird knows the end of this song

           but she is winging over water and must not waste her breath to sing

Mark Bramhill: The final poem today uses an ongoing feud Camille had with grackles at her birdfeeder to reflect on race:

Camille T. Dungy: It wasn't just even that they were scaring all the other birds away, but they just ate so much feed! You were just filling it daily almost. And this was right around the time of Eric Garner and the protest around that tragedy. And my very antagonistic feelings about these big black birds grew pretty complicated. Because I'm always really trying to think about my attitudes towards lives around me and how those attitudes can so easily become dangerous for those other lives.

And so it feels like I'm just talking about looking at birds, but I think  that it always, for me, very quickly, swivels back to thinking about what it means to be a human. And particularly in this case, what it means to be a Black human, who is so often part of a subset that is maligned and set apart in that way.

Frequently Asked Questions: 10

Do you see current events differently because you were raised by a black father and are married to a black man?

  I am surprised they haven’t left already — 

things have gotten downright frosty, nearly unbearable.
A mob of them is apparently mouthing off outside

when I put down my newspaper and we all gather
to stand beside my daughter in the bay

of kitchen windows. Quiscalus quiscula:

this name sounds like a spell which, after its casting,
will make things crumble into a complement

of unanswerable questions. Though, if you need me

to tell you God’s honest truth, I know nothing

but their common name the morning we watch them attack
our feeder. I complain about the mess they leave. Hulls

I’ll have to sweep up or ignore. My father — 

who I am thankful is still alive — says We could use
a different kind of seed. A simple solution. We want that

brown bird with the shock of red: the northern flicker.
We want western bluebirds, more of the skittish

finches. But mostly we get grackle grackle grackle

all day long. Can it be justifiable to revile these
harbingers? They scoff all we offer

and — being too close and too many — scare

other birds away. My husband says, Look
at all those crackles. I almost laugh at him,

but the winter air does look hurtful loud

around the black flock. Like static is loud when it sticks
sheets to sheets so they crackle when pulled

one from another. And sting. My father — who is older now

than his older brothers will ever be — promises
he will solve the problem of the grackles

and leaves the window to search for his keys.

The dawn sky — blue breaking into blackness — 
is what I see feathering their bodies. The fence

is gray. The feeder is gray, the aspen bark. Gray

hulls litter the ground. But the grackles,

their passerine claws — three facing forward, one turned
back — around the roost bar of the feeder, are

so bright within their blackness, I pray they will stay.

Mark Bramhill: You can find links to Camille T. Dungy’s book Trophic Cascade, and her other books, including the anthology she edited, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry — on our website, BirdNote.org. And of course, we have more episodes with poetry about our feathered friends there, too. For BirdNote, I'm Mark Bramhill.

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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Editor: Jazzi Johnson
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Content Director: Jonese Franklin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York.
ML163901 - California Condor recording by Vincent Gerwe. ML342317931 - Baltimore Oriole recording by Jeff Ellerbusch. ML420578541 - Great-tailed Grackle recording by Joshua C'deBaca. ML12642 - Great-tailed Grackle recording by L. Irby Davis. ML84808 - Northern Flicker recording by Wil Hershberger. ML125391 - Western Bluebird and ML111057 - American Goldfinch recording by Thomas G. Sander.
Music: Etude 3 Chessanta, On the Hour, and Vally VX by Blue Dot Sessions.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2023 BirdNote April 2023
Narrator: Mark Bramhill

ID# dungyc-01-2023-04-05    dungyc-01