On Black Nature: African American Poets Reflect

The barreleye fish, with its transparent head and green orbs for eyes; a Columbian beaked toad that skips the tadpole stage and hatches straight into life as a toadlet; a bald parrot; the miniscule gecko known as Lepidoblepharis buschwaldii; four or five dozen new species found along the Antarctic sea floor; the long-nosed tree frog and a tree mouse from New Guinea; and a collection of over ninety African American nature poets: this is but a small catalog of the diversity whose presence was undocumented before 2010. Like the newly photographed deep-sea chimaera that evolved independently of sharks over 400 million years ago, these have been around all along, but we’re only just now figuring out how to see them.

Already I might have landed myself in hot water. I’ve compared Black poets to animals. Given our history in this country, a history that relied on yoking Blacks with the rest of the chattel, and after all we’ve accomplished and the struggles we’ve been through to do so, how dare I sully our achievements thus.

History and culture almost immediately present complicating factors when we try to talk about Black poets in America. Almost immediately, words about our relationship to the wildness of the world are influenced by race. The writers whose work is collected in the following pages are fully aware of this reality. Each has asked what it means for a Black poet to write about nature. Each has asked what it means to be separate or inseparable from the natural world.

Evie Shockley, Remica Bingham, Amber Flora Thomas, Camille T. Dungy, and Janice Harrington, the poets represented in this special section, are also represented in Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), edited by Camille T. Dungy. Their essays are derived from talks given at conferences or symposia during 2010 on panels convened to celebrate the first collection of nature poetry by African American poets. In an effort to continue the conversation begun by Black Nature, each poet gathered here is represented by new poems not featured in the anthology.

Among the joys of collecting the work that would make up Black Nature was the discovery of so many poems that take as their subject our “natural experiences.” While I began the compilation of this anthology thinking this would be the definitive collection of such work, I sent the manuscript to the publisher hoping it would be a cornerstone, a text that would help lay a foundation for many more similar collections. This Callaloo special section presents a robust sampling of some of the rising voices active in today’s conversation. Their essays make it clear that they are part of an active community of writers, all of whom are worthy of our attention. Many African American poets have been waiting to be seen in this light, have been actively participating in conversations about nature poetry (by any of its many names), but have been too often overlooked or ignored. In their essays and their poems, each writer collected here ponders what it means to be a Black writer who writes about the natural world. How do they and the poets they write about see themselves and their poetry, and how might others view them? Of great curiosity for many is the question of why it might be that, until late 2009, there had never been such a collection of African American poets writing about the natural world.

Phillis Wheatley, the first Black in America to publish a book of poetry, wrote of birds, oceans, and the peculiar climate in the region where she came to live. George Moses Horton, born circa 1797, wrote about the landscape surrounding him too. The same holds true for Albery Whitman (b. 1851), George Marion McClelland (b. 1860), Paul Laurence Dunbar (b. 1872) and Alice Dunbar-Nelson (b. 1875), all poets included in Black Nature. But consider McClelland’s “sycamores and moss-hung cypress trees,” Dunbar’s “caged bird.” Those who know these poets’ work know that the words “landscape” and “climate” are as much a reflection of...