Gathered together, students and faculty accept the invitation to briefly wander in and between two distinct minds: Knox alumni Vida Cross and Michael Walsh. The presence of these esteemed authors at Knox’s Caxton Reading event is particularly special. Their return to a past home is a testament to Knox. Breathing conviction into our present community—we too, can create impact.
Poetry is a praxis – It is a point of connection in more ways than one. Cross connects blues music to written language in her book Bronzeville at night (1949). Following the blues tradition, she renders rhythm, culture, and artwork into poetic language. Cross’s poetry tethers together Archibald J. Motley Jr., Langston Hughes, and stories passed down from her own family. She pulls inspiration from academic research, paintings, and second-hand experiences to mold a world exploding with life.
Reading from his book, The Dirt Riddles, as well as unpublished pieces, Walsh intertwined the old with the new, offering a glimpse at the ways his work has changed and stayed the same over the years. He mingles the old with the new in his writing, too. Walsh writes about people and land from his past, placing a map in the reader’s hand, we travel along poetic lines towards who he is today.
Most notably, Walsh creates space for queerness and ecology to converge. Queer people are completely natural. Why, then, are they left out of ecological discussion? Walsh meditates on queerness and nature in his poems, something he articulates further in the following interview.
Poetry connects us, too. Knox students were able to meet the poets – to share, to listen, and to ponder together. Readings like this can give the audience a glimpse into a specific community or culture, at the same time, possessing the power to create one anew.
There is also a connection to poetry. Delightful language, provoking imagery, and so much more manifested a stillness in the audience. We time-traveled back to Chicago during the Harlem Renaissance; we had our hands in mud and manure; we danced through the streets of Bronzeville; and ran across corn fields at dusk.
Experiencing this living, breathing artwork collectively is vital – it acts as a meditation and a declaration. We are incredibly grateful to both Vida Cross and Michael Walsh for returning to Knox and gifting a new generation of students a walk into their minds.
I had the added privilege and pleasure of interviewing Michael Walsh, and it was a conversation I know I will revisit and treasure.
Walsh is the author of The Dirt Riddles and Creep Love as well as the editor of Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology. With respect to The Dirt Riddles, Walsh says “This book is the place where I grew up” and Creep Love “…is the people I am from”. Although his poems are diverse in theme, all three books arc towards queer ecopoetry—a practice and art that merges queer theory and queer identity with environmentalism.
In the introduction of Queer Nature Walsh initiates a sort of broadening of the genre. He lists the topics: “appetite, body, death, desire, gender, habitat, home, hope, love, metamorphosis, monstrosity, nation, race, and of course, sex” all in addition to nature, as qualifiers for queer ecopoetry.
Walsh received his bachelors in creative writing, here, at Knox College. He studied under Robin Metz, the co-founder of Knox College’s creative writing program. Walsh speaks earnestly about the beloved professor, talking about how Metz prompted him to think about land poetics and ecopoetics—this investigation remained. He is grateful for the personalized education he received at Knox, as it was incredibly fostering of his creative skill.
“I had the experience of really being opened up by classes at Knox College,” Walsh said.
Specifically, Walsh commends the Knox Creative Writing program as being a favorite space of his.
Here, begins a conversation with Michael Walsh.
Bethany Duffey: In your introduction, Professor Nick Regiacorte used the phrase “bruised and beautiful” to describe your poetry. I would describe The Dirt Riddles as a very raw and intense read for me—that is not to say it was unpleasant. I savored every poem. But your work stands out from other ecopoets I am familiar with, like Aimee Nezhukamatatil and Joy Harjo, because of the disturbing and grotesque imagery and language trestled throughout. Why did you make this choice, and how does it relate to queerness?
Michael Walsh: I wanted to be truthful to my experience growing up on a dairy farm. People have a view of farms as being, oh I don’t know, maybe like The Little House on the Prairie—that they’re quaint, and that everything grows very easily and is raised very easily. You don’t [often] get to see behind the scenes to some of the grittier parts of farmlife, and I wanted to show that here in these poems. Then, in addition, in poetics, I’m interested in embodiment, and the images that I write are not just images—they contain concepts and ideas within them. So, my poems don’t expand out openly into other ideas the way that some of the other ecopoet’s [poems] do. My ideas are submerged. So, if you think of ways that poems can open out and up – that’s not what I’m doing in these poems – they go down, and they kind of unfold underground, so they’re a different poetic movement.
BD: Would you relate that to queerness at all?
MW: The way that I would describe it is that I was able to find a way to queer the language of a farm and to write about a farm from within my perspective, so I’m using farm language and managing to alter it enough in little ways that I queer it.
BD: Why is queer ecopoetry essential?
MW: I feel that queer poets are often left out of environmental discussions, and that queer people are left out of environmental discussions, and the reason is that we don’t reproduce, for the most part, and environmental discussions always end up being about survival, and also having more kids, like, ‘what are our children going to do?’ That’s often how the rhetoric works. I can really only speak for myself. There are a lot of queer identities [and] everyone has a different take on it […] Like some other queer people, I think of myself as being totally natural. I am part of the world, I am not abnormal, I am not a freak of nature, I am not unnatural. I get to do a kind of ecological work that takes place just within my lifespan. I’m not going to have kids that are going to carry on my life’s work, I don’t have kids that I have to be concerned about. I have met so many queer people who are ecologists or are doing land work over the years, and I think that it’s important to recognize that queer ecology exists. People do this kind of work. Queer people are present in land restoration and land justice movements and climate change movements. You know, just because we don’t all have kids, it doesn’t mean that we’re uninvolved, it actually means that it’s something that we can take more of our discussionary time to spend time on.
BD: Ada Limon writes in You Are Here “A poem can seem so small, so minor, so invisible, especially when up against the daily crises and catastrophes that our planet is facing […] How can a poem make a difference?” What are your thoughts on this sentiment, and do you want your poems to make a difference? Is that important to you?
MW: I want my poems to make a difference for queer people. To be honest, the reason why I’ve written the things that I have, is that, when I was reading poems when I was younger, I could find versions of my life or versions of my story in other poets, but I couldn’t find this story [holds up his book]. I just wasn’t there. The way that I think about a book like The Dirt Riddles is, if this is a book that helps other queer people orient to their own situations growing up, the land where they grew up, or land that they moved to and come to bond with, I think I’ve done my work—I’m totally happy. People like to talk about healing with my work, and I want to be nuanced about this. I will hear that both of my books have grotesque images or difficult images in them – there’s something honest about that – and I will also hear from people that they find these books are healing in a way, like for example if they are from a farm, or they know a place like this really well, reading someone else’s poetic experience can really shift their own understanding—it helps them. Again, I said this earlier, but these are all reasons why I do it; because I don’t think that our hetero-dominent culture wants us to heal.
BD: I am going to backtrack because I want to better understand the images that you use – the ‘grotesque’, like you said – mainly, because they are appealing and unsettling in the same breath, and I am so interested in how you do this.
MW: A friend of mine was trying to describe my poems to me and I think she did a good job with it […] She said, “Michael, when you write about the natural world, you are interested in the things in nature that are grotesque – it’s what you’re poetically drawn to.” I’m interested in molds, worms, spiders, and I’m not creeped out by them. I see them as beautiful, which is why I write about them. So for me, what I’m doing in many of my poems is I’m taking a subject that looks inherently ugly, and the way that I describe it, and the way that I elevate it in poems, I believe I manage to make it beautiful. I’m revealing something about these grotesque subjects that is inherently beautiful.
BD: And that’s inherently queer?
MW: It’s inherently queer, right. It’s a queering process.
BD: The last poem you read [an unpublished poem], where you got a little bit emotional, it seemed—
MW: A little—
BD: Was that about climate change?
MW: It’s about climate change, yeah.
BD: It’s bleak. The future, I mean. Do you feel hopeful?
MW: I believe that the Earth will survive. You know, I’m not sure about humanity. I think humanity will probably survive, but I think that we will look really different from who we are now, right? And I don’t know what that will look like. I could try to imagine it in a speculative future, but I’m not sure. But one thing that I have absolute faith in, is that I have faith in the planet. I do.
BD: It will restore itself.
MW: It will restore itself, and there are plenty of creatures that will be fine. Cockroaches will be fine. All the things that are ugly; small and ugly will be fine. They’re all the things that I’m writing about. They’re going to be fine, right? We’re probably going to lose whales. We’re probably going to lose many other big, beautiful creatures, that’s what I think. I’m not sure that efforts to save them long term will work because extinction is a thing that just happens on the planet. We happen to be instigating it, or if not instigating it, totally kindling it—we’re making it work faster. The thing that I like to think about in [regards to] climate change is that the Earth goes through a lot of cycles over geological time, and geological time is much bigger than all of this. In a million years, we could actually be in an ice age, there could be ice everywhere. Who will survive and be there for that?
Who will survive and be there for that? I have lingered on this last statement from Walsh. I wonder, who would want to survive that? Sociologically, who would be able and allowed to? This final remark is both ominous and curious, resemblant of his poetry. We are, at the same time, asked to imagine the future and reimagine how we are living in the present.
In a conversation with Walsh, where I asked him for advice regarding writing poetry about the natural world, he said: “I let the images of the place fill me up. I am what’s being inhabited.” I wonder if this is where we start.
