Pull the bluebird down from the sky

On loss, home, nature and our need to mourn in order to heal: a conversation with poet-activist Betsy Andrews.

Starling murmuration at RSPB Saltholme. Source: You Tube.

10.4.22.

On Sunday, I stepped out of my house in the early morning and a strong cold wind blew around my calves. It was very early; I was taking the dog out for her business, still dressed in my bathrobe and slippers. The wind was noisy, throwing around loose ends of debris, shaking the tree branches. I looked up at the sky to see where the birds might be. None were visible. This must be Ian, I thought. They were the last windy gusts of a hurricane that was still flooding parts of South Carolina and Virginia after devastating a long stretch of western coastal Florida. Here in Brooklyn, we were spared, but back there, new rivers had formed in the city streets.

I thought of Winnie the Pooh, and his blustery home in the Hundred-Acre Wood, which is modeled after East Sussex. The wind blew so strongly that my little dog, Scarlet, bent her face down to urge us back inside, her nose a cold spot on my shin. She’d seen enough. I thought then of Dorothy and Toto, and how so many survivors of Ian are now asking what she asked, how do I go home? Where is home? They’re feeling the devastation of loss and a sense of immediate dislocation and the hollow, clear-eyed sobriety of disaster survivors who know nothing can be the same now—there really is no home to go back to. I thought of the wind as a Cassandra, warning us anew about the perils of ignoring and harming nature, of the power of forces that we can’t control, as much as we try.

I thought about my friend Megan, who lives in Jacksonville, and endured both Covid and the outer bands of Ian last week. Her house stood firm. So did the houses of my brother and cousin on the peninsula in Ormond Beach, with some damage. My brother’s backyard fence came down; so did a tree, narrowly missing his roof. My cousin’s daughters posted Facebook pictures of themselves scooping inches of rainwater out of their dining room. The river was halfway up the backyard, a river where it’s not unusual to see dolphins and alligators pass by. They were all very lucky, by comparison to everyone in the epicenter of the storm — Ft. Myers and Sanibel Island and Naples, etc. My friends there had wisely evacuated. But the reckoning has barely begun.

But go where? That was the question then and it remains the question now, for so many. Not only in battered Florida and fire-ravaged California and Oregon, but Texas and the shores of New Jersey—everywhere that nature has revealed its destructive fury in recent years. Go where? Where shall we go where the planet is not revealing its imbalance, where nature is not expressing its wounds? Where can we go to feel safe? It’s a question that reflects the larger instability that many feel about our political climate, and the persistence of Covid, which is still making people sick for days and has caused crippling long Covid. I feel overwhelmed, friends tell me. I feel stuck. I’m not happy but would it better elsewhere?

Photo Credit: USA Today. 2022.

It's not as if these questions are new either, but each disaster sharpens the intensity of our concern, our awareness of the urgency of climate change and the high natural and human cost of ignoring our responsibility to be stewards of the planet. Along with the feeling of loss and instability, there are also the burning questions: what should I do? What’s my role here now? Where do I act to make a difference? What am I doing to protect the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea?

These are the among the questions that drive the fierce poetry in Betsy Andrew’s latest collection, Crowded. A book-length poem meant to be read as a whole, Crowded is a lyrical cri de coeur about our ailing planet. It’s also the third book of a planned quartet, each representing a key element of nature: earth, water, air, fire. New Jersey —earth —came first, in 2007, an antiwar collection sparked by the ramp up of wars after September 11. Next came The Bottom —water — in 2014, a book about the decimation of the oceans. Her first book concluded with a call for love as the antidote to war. Her second was, she admits, less hopeful. It asks, is anybody out there who can find us? Who will be our witness? In Crowded, she says, she embraced a critical step in the Jungian process of healing, of death and rebirth: mourning. A fourth book, about fire, is already brewing. In it, she hopes to channel good anger—versus bad anger— into a call to action.

 I called Betsy up to chat about Crowded (Nauset Press, 2022), which I heard her read from recently at a wonderful Governor’s Island poetry festival. The book is dedicated to her father, the late Joseph John Andrews, who died in 2015 and serves as a sort of spiritual muse for the book, she tells me, to help ground readers in the collection. He’s presented as a figure of paternal abuse—a negative Cassandra—one she mourns as she mourns the wounds he inflicted. He’s all over this book, Betsy says. He’s always the dark muse. He was an alcoholic and his life was shaped by the disasters of the 20th century. Impoverished immigration and industrialization and the Korean war…he was all shot up. He just didn’t survive, and so none of us really did.

Betsy was raised with three siblings in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She describes her father as an Eastern European gearhead, from coal crackers, very different from her Jewish, middle-class mother. He was a conspicuous consumer, she adds. We had 40 cars at any one time… he’d do the country club thing and pretend to be somebody he wasn’t. But it was really brutal. In our conversation, that word—brutal – keeps coming up. Her father represents a product of a damaged society, one that harms.

Early on, words and poems provided Betsy with a refuge and source for creative expression. At 10, she was giving her parents illustrated poems for Christmas. She was an English major in college and worked on an alternative newspaper there. She also took a poetry workshop but was 30 before she got really serious about her poetry. In between, she came out as a lesbian, studied anthropology, then got disenchanted by the field and became an adult education teacher. In her late 20s she got an MFA and went to study at George Mason with the celebrated poet and writer Carolyn Forché; she’s now a close friend. She discovered the dynamic performative poetry slam scene of the early 90s at the Nuyorican Poets Café on the Lower East Side. It was all really happening and exciting, she recalls.

Poems weren’t going to pay the rent though, so she applied her writing skills to an area where she had a lot of experience: working in restaurants. She got a job writing about them at Zagat. Her reviews were, she says, like little found poems. That sparked a journalism career that expanded to writing about drinks, and farming and agriculture and so many aspects of nature. She travels a lot for work and she’s passionate about reporting what she finds. Still, she admits, poetry offers her a more intimate, emotional relationship with readers.

I am compelled to write poetry, she stresses. I am my best person when I am doing it—when I’m doing this thing that feels so close to my soul and feels like a way of looking at the world that I couldn’t look at any other way. That’s very important to me.

Crowded opens with an epigraph by the Jungian psychologist Greg Morgenson, who helped inspire her own response to the crisis of climate change:

               Today, for the first time in human history, the human race, collectively, is mourning for a dying planet. The fate of the earth depends on our understanding the dynamics of the mourning process. Though it is tempting to lament the fate of the earth and blame our forebears for its present state, we must put these childish sentiments aside and take up the adult task of re-visioning our ancestral inheritance and educating the dead.

 –Greg Morgensen, Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process.

The book is really about Jungian perspectives on mourning and grief, Betsy tells me. You have to mourn, before you can go on. Much of the book was written on various writing residencies in places of incredible natural beauty. She brings her canoe and spends the mornings exploring nature, and the afternoons writing. One day, she was hiking in a beautiful corner of Appalachia, and she came upon a house with a giant Confederate flag. It reflected the political problem we face, she felt. This is an inability to mourn and move on, she says. The Old South flag is a racist anachronism that they can’t get over — the loss…. They being the views and politics of red-state, Q-Anon, white power fans who support Donald Trump, who ban abortion, who deny climate change, who cling to the Master’s antebellum slavery mentality. You have to accept loss, she counters. It’s a pathology if you can’t accept loss. We can’t be healthy in our approach to the planet and each other until we accept the losses.

Crowded is a book about air, about the sky that she says, is full of birds as well as particulate matter. It’s a dense read, jammed full of images and ideas. I like to pack the most amount of energy into a line, Betsy explains of her process. I do a lot of research, a lot of bricolage and collage, from the news and science and mythology and whatever. I am a very oral poet, she adds. What drives the lines is rhyme and rhythm...and of course what I’m meaning. I write really carefully. I might tweak a little bit but it’s pretty complete when I’m done.

One of my favorite passages in Crowded is below. It captures the problem of our planet, which is a problem of ongoing denialism, of craven capitalism, and the failed leadership of broken white men like Donald Trump who would destroy us all rather than accept the prospect of loss:

               The President’s favorite recipe for the President’s slice of the whole condemned pie:

               take the cricket out of othe bluebird’s mouth, pull the bluebird down from the sky,

               drain the sky of its cyan and indigo, its sapphire, azure, cobalt, and teal,

               steal the owl from the tree’s embrace, erase the tree and the forest that hugs it,

               tug the reeds from the blackbird’s feet, drain the blackbird’s sweetgrass swamp,

               chomp the brush and flush the snipes, wipe the soil clean of its blossoms,

               and throw away all the bugs. Pull the rug from under the buzzard’s fine breeze,

               squeeze the lake dry and evict all the grebes, plug the yawning holes with sprawl.

               On this leftover tinpot fragment of dirt orbiting a burning hurt, now you can build

your wall.

Below are some links to Betsy’s work and projects, and her upcoming book readings of Crowded.

Readings:

Oct. 9, 3 pm, Della in Windsor Terrace

https://www.facebook.com/events/1729154380795122?ref=newsfeed

Nov. 4, 7 pm.

Lit Lit series, Howland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY

Order the book: https://www.nausetpress.com/crowded-by-betsy-andrews

All about Betsy: https://betsyandrews.contently.com/

Global Poemic – Kindred Voices on the Era of COVID-19 , co-curated with VK Sreelesh.
https://globalpoemic.wordpress.com/