Natural Destruction

The South has been plagued with destruction seemingly since the Civil War. The land was purged economically and physically, as well as being stripped of its young men. Recently, Hurricane Katrina and the South’s agricultural economy have also recapitulated this sense of devastation and desolation. In many of the poems we’ve read this year, these images of destruction are paired with images of nature to reemphasize not only the importance of nature to the South, but also to communicate the despair the South feels for the ruined aspects of nature, as a result of civilization or the powerful energy of nature. In Robin Kemp’s This Pagan Heaven, there are several poems that describe the destruction of Katrina. However, one of the most intricately linked poems about nature and destruction is “Pelican Sonnet”. Here, she describes how the brown pelican was nearly completely obliterated by manmade growth. It’s clear that this bird is beautiful and worthy and that they survived in spite of civilization. As a sonnet, the turning point shows the transition from the destruction of nature to the speaker’s observation of natural phenomena. In a book of poems about the changes wrought in Louisiana as a result of an epic hurricane, this poem sticks out as a description of changes wrought by human nature. Perhaps it is suggesting that man is still subject to the force of nature, despite their attempts to control it.

Stacey Lynn Brown manages to combine imagery of destruction, nature, the Civil War and the modern South. In part XI of her poem, Cradle Song, she describes the natural phenomenon of Stone Mountain and its enormous relief of the Confederate heroes. Nature has been appropriated as a memorial of the antebellum South. The poem describes how the laser show glorifies the waste and death of battle, and how the humiliating surrender “under an old oak tree” is exchanged for this huge neon spectacle. Nature is associated with the extraordinary ("largest outcrop of granite in the world") and the nostalgic (the iconic Confederate surrender), and man’s imposition on it is painted as garish and self-serving. The use of nature by man and in this poem emphasizes the South’s love-hate relationship with it and also how destruction wrought by civilization has a different meaning in the South. Nature is perhaps the South’s consolation prize; there is no great prosperity in economy or affluence, but the agrarian and defiant tradition is still something to own and remember.

Collin Kelley’s Slow to Burn is the collection most devoid of nature imagery of those that we’ve read this semester. There are many images of water but they are mostly urban associations. However, one such instance of water imagery occurs in a context of natural phenomena. “The Virgin Mary Appears In A Highway Underpass” describes the marvel of the Virgin’s face appearing in such odd places as underpasses and sandwiches. The reference in the poem is of a water stain in a Chicago underpass, and the speaker, seemingly annoyed with the idea that Mary would show herself in such mundane places, entreats her to embody a thunder cloud and ride over America, demanding awareness: “command attention, instead of this slight of hand, a stain to be cleaned with soap and water,/so easily erased.” It seems that the destruction suggested here is that of faith. It is juxtaposed with the grime of the city and the mundane images of sandwiches and condensation, suggesting the lack of natural beauty. Possibly Mary’s appearance is a phenomenon and perhaps ruination of faith is accomplice to urban life. This is a very different kind of destruction and nature, but the felt absence of nature in this particular poem serves to facilitate the sense of destruction.

Pelican Sonnet

“Who the hell writes a sonnet about a pelican?”

Wide wings outspread above the bayou’s mouth,

a sky-hung V of brown with kite-webbed feet,

curved grace of neck, slick crest of gold crown, neat

white mask, fish-crooking beak, stretched-flesh-fold pouch:

the pelicans are back, though nearly lost

to DDT when I was still a child,

their eggshells crumbled in their nests in “wild-

and-scenic” habitats. Grown up, I crossed

the continent before I saw my first

wild pelicans, beyond the rocky beach,

formation-flying out of humans’ reach,

plotting their courses back to bayous cursed

with petrochemicals. They did not fail:

behold the blessing of each brown wing’s sail.

Robin Kemp (This Pagan Heaven, 8)

"The Virgin Mary Appears in a Highway Underpass"

Collin Kelley (Slow to Burn, 10)

XI.

Georgia boasts the largest outcrop
of granite in the world: bald
Stone Mountain long revered
by the Cherokee as holy,

and now upon its face, the carved
icons of our defeat: Jackson,
Davis, and Lee, horseback
and caped in their chivalry.

It took a crew of masons nearly sixty
years to finish, its scale so vast
nine men could shelter
in the nostril of a horse come rain.

Backdrop of my summers spent
picnicking on open fields
while rednecks circled its wide base
in stomper 4×4s.

Each night at dusk, the laser show
would beam its green technology
on the face of that monumental rock:
trapezoids and triangles pulsating to

jazz fusion grooves, crude cartoons:
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
clearly kicking young Johnny's ass,
Ray Charles and Willie Nelson swapping

Georgia on My Mind.
And in the finale, General Lee
would guide us again in fluorescent relief,
unsheathing his sword to lead his men

at a galloping gait
across battlefields laid to waste:
canons smoking, bodies slumped
in dying's contorted certainty.

And reckoning the cost
as he measured what was lost, he
broke his sword across his knee
in a motion of civility—

no treaties or humiliation,
no surrender under an old oak tree,
just this revisionary choice, a gift,
a balm, a necessary gesture

sure to assuage the Rebs on blankets
on the lawn, whooping the nobility of it all.

Stacey Lynn Brown (Cradle Song, 30)

(image courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hurricane_Katrina_August_28_2005_NASA.jpg)